by Peter Mayle
It eventually made its appearance in England, only to be regarded as a curiosity coming from the wrong side of the Channel, and definitely unsuitable for consumption with fish and chips or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. If you were an adventurous cook who felt the need to buy some of this suspect foreign fluid, the only place you could have any hope of finding it was in the chain of pharmacies known as Boots the Chemist. Here, next to the cough remedies, bunion cures, denture cleaners, chest rubs and dandruff shampoos, you might be lucky enough to come across a small, plain bottle of medicinal appearance labelled Olive Oil. It was not considered necessary to put any details on the label – not the country of origin, nor the grower's name, nor the mill where the olives had been pressed. And certainly nothing as inflammatory to the English imagination as extra virgin. Olive oil was merely a commodity; not even a popular commodity.
Today, after more than 2,000 years of being more or less confined to southern Europe, olive oil has spread north to those cold, grey countries where olive trees very sensibly refuse to grow. It has spread west across the Atlantic, too, although the early pioneer olives suffered a very discouraging start on arrival in America, being plunged into glasses of icy gin to shiver in the depths of a Martini.
Luckily for all of us, the world is now a more civilized place. You can still find olives behind the bar, but the oil has been promoted – first to the kitchen, and more recently to the tables in desperately fashionable restaurants of the kind that present you with a separate list of mineral waters. In these often highly self-conscious establishments, the chefs make a point of mentioning their chosen oil by name, and extra virgin has become the heroine of many a house salad dressing. Slugs of hard liquor before dinner are out. Saucers of oil are in, to be mopped up with bread. Alas, it can only be a matter of time before oil snobs start sending back the original saucer of Tuscan frantoio and demanding the less well-known – and therefore more highly prized by status eaters – corni cabra from Toledo.
This increasingly widespread flow of oil is encouraging news for your heart and your arteries, as well as your tastebuds. Doctors agree, as much as doctors ever agree about anything, that olive oil is good for you. It helps the digestion, fights bad cholesterol, slows down the ageing process of skin, bones and joints and is even said to protect against certain forms of cancer. In other words, it can be enjoyed without guilt or digestive remorse, and world consumption is on the rise.
But among oil men here in Provence there is a mild irritation, an occasional touch of gastronomic pique, that the best olive oil is almost always associated with Italy. Given the facts, this is hardly surprising. Italy produces about 25 per cent of all the oil coming from the countries around the Mediterranean, and for years the Italian growers – ‘those Tuscan windbags’, as Régis calls them – have been marketing it with imagination and great success. In contrast, Provence accounts for no more than 3 per cent of the Mediterranean total, and so far has been uncharacteristically modest about its efforts.
I came across these production figures in the course of pursuing an ambition I have had for years. One morning long ago, when I saw that first sunny slope planted with olive trees, I thought what a delight it would be to have a grove – even a tiny, amateur-sized grove – to call my own and be able to look at every day. I loved the prehistoric appearance of the trunks, the generous spread of branches, and the way the leaves changed colour from green to silver-grey as they rippled in the wind. But taking pleasure in the tree's appearance was just the start. Over the years I have developed an addict's taste for olives; on their own, or as black, creamy tapenade spread over quails' eggs; in tarts and salads, in daubes, or studded into loaves of bread. And then there is the oil. We cook with it, lace our soups with it, preserve goat's cheeses in it, and now I've taken to drinking a small glass of it every day before breakfast. It is one of the oldest, purest tastes in the world, a taste that hasn't changed for thousands of years.
The thought of having all the joys of the olive available just steps away in the field behind the house was so exciting that I managed to overlook an obvious problem: the trees that I admired and coveted, those gnarly, wrinkled, timeless monuments to nature, were each at least 100 years old. If I planted young trees – a collection of five-year-olds, let's say, very little more than shoots – I would have to add an extra century to my life to be sure of enjoying the results. I like to think that I'm an optimist, but there are limits.
It was Régis who attempted to put me straight, as he so often does. If I wanted venerable trees – anything from 100 to 300 years old – he knew a man from Beaumes-de-Venise who could help. There is a micro-climate near Beaumes-de-Venise, a pocket of land where olive trees grow thick on the hills, and Régis's friend would be delighted to dig up some prime old specimens for me. Just two minor conditions, Régis said, would have to be observed: payment would have to be in cash, and delivery of the trees would need to be made at night.
‘Why is that?’ I asked. ‘Aren't the trees his?’
Régis spread both hands, palm down, in front of him, and waggled them as if he were trying to keep his balance. ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘But they will be. He'll inherit them from his father.’
‘But his father has to die first.’
‘Tout à fait,’ said Régis. ‘That's why they have to be moved at night, so the neighbours don't see anything. The old boy won't know. He never goes out.’
Somehow I didn't find the idea of an illicit olive grove very appealing, and so I asked Régis if he knew of a more respectable tree dealer.
‘Well, they exist,’ he said. ‘But you have to be careful. They import the trees.’ He raised his eyebrows and shook his head. ‘You wouldn't want Italian trees, would you?’ From the tone of his voice, it sounded as though they suffered from some incurable disease. But of course they weren't French, and this, as far as Régis was concerned, disqualified them from any serious consideration.
In fact, he made me realize that I wasn't at all sure what I wanted. Old trees, certainly. Beautiful trees. But what kind of trees? I'd read enough to know that there were at least a dozen different varieties growing in Provence, some smaller than others, some more resistant to extreme cold and the unwelcome attentions of the olive fly, some that gave a bigger crop – useful as general background information, but lacking in the kind of detail necessary for a potential grove owner. What I needed was someone who could tell a confused novice whether to plant salonenque, picholine or aglandau, when and where to plant, how to fertilize and prune. What I needed was a professor of olives.
Experts are not difficult to find in Provence. All the bars I know are full of them, but the trick is to meet an expert whose knowledge is equal to his enthusiasm. This time, I was lucky. A friend knew of a man – un homme sérieux – who had a small but growing business devoted to olive oil, and not just the oil of his native Haute Provence. He had started to do for olive oil what négociants have traditionally done for wine: finding the best from the hundreds of growers and thousands of groves scattered around the Mediterranean basin. That was his patch, and it included Andalusia, Catalonia, Crete, Galilee, Greece, Sardinia, Tuscany, the Atlas Mountains – wherever good oil was made. His name, appropriately enough, was Olivier, his company was called Oliviers & Co., and his head office was in the village of Mane, not far from Forcalquier.
It's a small village, and a modest head office – an old stone house, plain and substantial. The offices are upstairs, and on the ground floor is a shop where the visitor can browse among an international selection of oils. Not only browse, but sample; bottles and stubby porcelain tasting spoons are laid out on the table so that you can sip before you buy. You can compare, for instance, an oil from Andalusia with one from Chianti, or another from the valley of Les Baux – first-pressing extra virgins, all of them, each made from a different type of olive, each with its own highly distinctive bouquet and flavour, and each with its own particular colour, a range of delicate shades from jade green to a fine transpare
nt gold. Olive oils, as I discovered during my first half hour, can vary in character as much as wine. Even my palate, a sadly abused organ that morning after too many jolts of turbo-charged coffee, could distinguish between them.
The similarities with wine were emphasized by the tasting notes for each oil. These were written in language that had echoes of the cave: hints of citrus and blackcurrant buds, of artichokes and pepper, of fresh herbs – words and phrases that you might hear bandied about by those grand old men with florid noses who hold court in the cellars of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The one major difference is that there's no point in laying down a few cases of oil for your self-indulgent old age. Unlike many wines, oil doesn't improve with the years; young is best.
With my palate now well lubricated and my teeth still slick with oil, I went upstairs to meet Olivier. Dark, shorthaired and bespectacled, he has a quiet and academic air about him, and a scholarly vocabulary to go with it, as I found when I asked him to explain a phrase that had puzzled me ever since I first saw it displayed on a bottle of oil from Lucca, in Italy. Extra virgine.
I could never understand how anything could be extra virgin. This has always seemed to me like describing a woman as extra pregnant. How can there be degrees of virginity? I'd assumed it to be one of those flights of Italian self-promotion – my virgin is better than your virgin – that served no purpose other than to look impressive on a label.
Olivier looked at me over the top of his glasses. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘there are three stages of virginity. All olive oil contains free fatty acids. To be described as extra virgin, an oil must contain less than 1 per cent of these acids. More than 1 per cent but less than one and a half, and you have a vierge fine. Anything above this, up to 3.3 per cent, can only qualify as virgin.’ He smiled. ‘Virgin ordinaire. You understand?’
He went on to talk about vintages of olive oil, the ageing process that oils go through from the moment of pressing (extra virgin keeps longer than the lesser virgins, I was pleased to hear), and we were just getting into the deeper waters of organoleptic traits – taste factors, to you and me – when Olivier looked at his watch and said it was time to go.
As we drove to Forcalquier for that most essential part of the Gallic learning process, a long and well-considered lunch, the lesson continued. I was already aware that olive oil is good for you in a general sense, but I had no idea of some of the more refined applications. For example, oil beaten up with an egg yolk makes a face mask guaranteed to nourish the driest complexion. Oil laced with essence of rosemary takes the soreness out of stiff and aching muscles. A mixture of oil and green mint rubbed on to the temples is said to do wonders for migraine sufferers. For those about to suffer – from having too much to eat and drink – a tablespoon of oil taken neat before the start of any wretched excess coats the stomach lining, tempers the hangover and assures a smooth and well-ordered transit intestinal. Relief is also promised from constipation, as well as from that particularly French national ailment, the crise de foie (a rebellion of the liver following a surfeit of rich food and an ill-advised second bottle of heavy wine). And so, since it keeps your innards in such prime working order, it follows that generous daily doses of extra virgin help you to live longer. All in all, Olivier managed to make olive oil seem like a panacea for everything that ails man short of a broken leg.
Perhaps some of these are exaggerated claims, but I was happy to believe them. There are so many things in life I enjoy, from sun to cigars, which I'm told are bad for me, that a healthy pleasure is a rare treat. Anyway, I wasn't about to argue as we arrived in Forcalquier and made our way across the main square to the restaurant with a curious name – Le Lapin Tant Pis – and a chef, Gérard Vives, whom I wish I had as a neighbour. The chef was joining us for lunch, always a reassuring sign, and so were two of Olivier's colleagues. Not for the first time, I found myself an ignoramus among experts.
Olivier produced a bottle of his latest discovery, a local oil from Les Mées, and this we had to taste before lunch started in earnest. I was half expecting porcelain tasting spoons to be whipped out of pockets, but the technique here was a little more rustic. Bread was distributed, that irresistible, resilient bread which gives under a gentle squeeze from the fingers. Pieces were torn from the loaf, and I watched the professionals on either side of me using their thumbs to make small indentations in their bread. The bottle was passed, and the indentations were filled with oil. Heads were lowered, and noses were applied to take in the bouquet. Then, with restrained, birdlike sips, the oil was tasted, held in the mouth and swirled around the back teeth before being swallowed. Then we ate the bread, licked our thumbs and had some more.
This is only one of several tasting methods, and simpler than most. In Corsica, for instance, they put a few drops of oil into the hand, and warm them with a finger. Whether you then lick the hand or the finger depends, so I'm told, on the Corsican. Or there's the potato method, in which oil is drizzled on to pieces of steamed potato, with a mouthful of apple eaten in between tasting to clear the palate. In every case, a few deep breaths are recommended to mix air with the oil in your mouth, which releases all those organoleptic traits. This sounds easy enough until you try it. You discover, quickly and embarrassingly, that some practice is required before you master the knack of holding the oil in your half-open mouth without dribbling. When tasters are gathered together, you can always tell a beginner by his oily chin. In this case, mine.
But at least I was able to keep enough in my mouth to appreciate it; a lovely oil, spicy, with a very faint nip of peppery bitterness at the end. Olivier told me it had been pressed from three different varieties – aglandau, picholine and bouteillan, all of them resistant to the olive fly and hardy enough to survive the often severe Haute Provence winter. The kind of olives, perhaps, that I should think of planting.
One thing led to another, as it often does during a fine four-course lunch, and by the time we had finished I'd been invited to meet the trees that had produced the oil. The time of the harvest would be best, so Olivier said, around St Catherine's Day at the end of November. He could even arrange a guide – a man of passion and grande valeur – to instruct me as he took me through the groves.
I met Jean-Marie Baldassari at his office in Oraison. An instantly likeable man – friendly, relaxed, and with an air of calm that I've noticed before in people who work with nature and the seasons, he runs the local oil syndicate, and it soon became clear that the love of his professional life was the olive. A tree of great intelligence, he called it, a camel among trees, able to store enough water to keep it going through long periods of drought, an almost everlasting tree. There were some around Jerusalem, he told me, that are estimated to be 2,000 years old.
In Provence, the olive has gone through some hard times, suffering from both man and nature: from freak frosts like the memorably brutal year of 1956, or from a long-lasting tendency among farmers to replace olive groves with more profitable vineyards. (Since 1929, the number of olive trees in Provence has declined from eight million to two million.) And then there's general neglect. You see the victims on deserted, overgrown hillsides, their trunks strangled by ropes of wild ivy, entire trees almost hidden by brambles, apparently smothered to death. Amazingly, they survive. Cut away the ivy and the brambles, clean up the area around the base of the trunk, prune the tangle of branches, and in a year or so there will be olives. The intelligent camel, so it seems, is practically indestructible, capable of springing back to life again after going through an arboreal nightmare. I could see why Jean-Marie had such an admiration for it.
But even if every neglected tree in Provence were to be restored to perfect health, the production of oil would still be tiny compared to Italy and Spain (which I later heard described as ‘the Kuwait of olive oil’). Provence can't attempt to compete on quantity. It has to be quality, and as with almost everything in France that is particularly good to eat or drink, this means a highly-prized classification – AOC, or appellation d'origine cont
rôlée.
An AOC is similar to a manufacturer's guarantee, with the important difference that the manufacturers can't award it to themselves. It has to be officially sanctioned: tests have to be made, production conditions scrutinized, reams of paperwork completed and, of course, tastings conducted – I like to think that working for the AOC people is almost as well fed an occupation as being a Michelin inspector. The rules are strict, whether the appellation is given to wine or cheese or chickens. These have to come from the stated area (the origine), and the quality has to be of a sufficiently high standard to deserve the distinction. It's a system that encourages excellence, protects against imitations and lets customers know exactly what they can expect to get for their money. Two Provençal oils, from Nyons and Les Baux, already have AOC status, and the oils of Haute Provence will have joined them by the end of 1999.
‘Bon,’ said Jean-Marie. ‘So much for facts and figures. I expect you'd like to see some oil.’
There are seven working mills in Haute Provence, and our first stop was the Moulin des Pénitents outside Les Mées. Driving north along straight, empty roads, we were heading towards the Montagne de Lure, with its winter cap of snow. The day was bright and hard, and I didn't envy the olive-pickers who had been out there on the hills since early morning. To make a single litre, or two pints, of oil takes five kilos, or more than ten pounds, of olives, and no machine yet invented can pick the fruit without damaging the tree. Olives must be harvested by hand. I wondered how long the fingers would last before they froze. As Jean-Marie said, you have to love the trees to do the work.
The shock for a newly picked olive, after a brief lifetime of peace and quiet, must be considerable. It might have been tenderly plucked from the tree, but conditions go rapidly downhill from there: tossed into a sack, bundled into a van and delivered into the cacophony of a mechanical torture chamber. First to be washed, then to be crushed, then to be pressed, finally to be whirled around in a centrifuge.
