Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil
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“Hush, my dears, for I want to say something. I believe the gods of Olympus have sent this man to the Phaeacians. When I first saw him I thought him plain, but now his appearance is like that of the gods who dwell in heaven. I should like my future husband to be just such a man as he is.”
—Homer, Odyssey, Book VI
From 30,000 feet, the landscape of Puglia scrolling by below is a vast patchwork quilt of irregularly-shaped fields, each decorated with green polka dots of varying sizes: some as small as pinpricks and arranged in neat grids, others larger and irregularly scattered across the fields. As the plane descends through 5,000 feet toward a landing at Bari airport, and the aquamarine band of the Mediterranean comes into view, you see that the polka dots are olive trees: the small ones are young trees planted in neat ranks and files, according to modern agronomic practice, while the larger dots are ancient trees with huge, cloudlike crowns growing more or less randomly across the fields, where they were growing when the Crusaders rode through Puglia on their way to the Holy Land.
Olive trees grow close to the runway, and line the road on either side into town; many are ancient, corkscrew-trunked giants right out of the forests of fairy tale, with long limbs reaching horizontally and ending in drooping, witchlike fingers, a pruning method called “the chandelier.” On and on the olive groves go as you drive south, and as far as you can see in every direction, toward the low sandy coastline and the limestone plateau inland. Puglia’s sixty million olive trees are owned by 250,000 pugliesi—an average of 240 trees per person—in groves that have grown gradually smaller and more jagged as they’ve been passed down through the generations. Here and there is a bench in the shade of a big tree, or a tiny cottage of whitewashed stone that serves as both garden shed and vacation home, with an open-air oven for pizza or bread. The red soil is full of pale yellow fieldstones, which have been gathered and stacked to make dry-wall fences between the fields: olives, with their low, broad root systems, thrive in rocky, well-drained, calcareous soil. In sunny patches along the walls grow masses of climbing jasmine, and tall, flourishing Indian figs, also called the prickly pear, whose flat, oblong leaves give the scene a pinch of desert grit.
Six large swatches of Puglia’s patchwork quilt belong to the De Carlo family, who since the year 1600 have made oil from their groves in the flat limestone lowlands of Bitritto, just southeast of Bari. Today the family business is led by Grazia and Saverio, the matriarch and patriarch of the De Carlo clan. They are an unlikely pair, the Lady and the Farmer. She is dark and plump and pretty, immaculate in her pleated skirts, cashmere cardigans, gold bracelets, and a string of fat pearls. He is rawboned and slope-shouldered, with the windburned face and layered flannel and polar fleece clothes of a man who spends most of his time outdoors, in all weather. Grazia fixes you with dark brown eyes that are warm yet penetrating, like a hawk’s, and speaks eagerly and eloquently, her tanned hands fanning and fisting. Saverio speaks softly, with lowered eyes, as if shy, or weary. Often he’ll sketch out a thought with a few words, as terse and weighty as a poem, then fall silent and let Grazia fill it in. “A good oil-maker needs technology and the hoe,” he says, and then makes a little motion of entreaty to his wife, who amplifies: “To make the best oils, we combine the latest milling machinery with a mastery of traditional agricultural methods.”
Spend a day with them, though, and you see that despite their differences—or perhaps because of them—Grazia and Saverio are a perfect pair. You sense this by the way their children, Marina and Francesco, in their mid-twenties, fall silent and listen when either of them speaks, with brief glances of affection and complicity. You know by the way they’ll be good-naturedly poking fun at each other one moment, and the next, without really meaning to, bragging about each other. “Just look at how healthy he is,” Grazia says, jabbing her finger into her husband’s thick forearm, knotty as cordwood. “He’s spent his life hefting hundred-kilo bags of olives out of the back of trucks, and eating ridiculous quantities of olive oil. By now he’s indestructible.” Saverio says of Grazia: “At first she hated the olive oil business, but her courage and new ideas have made us a success—and right now they’re what’s keeping us afloat.”
Grazia comes from a wealthy merchant family, and had no experience in the oil business until she married Saverio. Yet, like many pugliesi, her earliest childhood memory involves olives. She remembers a misty December morning when she was three or four, walking with her mother at the beginning of the harvest into the olive groves that surrounded Bitritto. The pickers, all from local families, celebrated this momentous day with an annual rite, toasting bread slices over an olive-wood fire, pouring new oil over them, and sharing them around with the measured seriousness of a sacrament. Saverio’s first memory, instead, is set in his father’s mill:
he’s a small boy sitting with the workmen beside the millstone after a day’s picking, while the mule that had been turning the stone munches in its nosebag nearby, and the men cook a vegetable stew they call la bomba (“the bomb”) in a clay pot, singing folk songs whose words and tunes Saverio still remembers, though he hasn’t heard them for a half-century.
I first visited the De Carlo mill at the height of another harvest sixty-odd years later, in late November, a time of year when their machines run day and night. Crates of coratina and ogliarola olives, hand-picked just as they’d begun to turn color from green to pale purple, were arriving on tractors and three-wheeled Api and being stacked outside the mill, in columns thirty feet high. Grazia walked me through the extraction process. A workman dumped crates of olives into a stainless steel bin, where spinning tines and a jet of warm air removed leaves and stems, after which they slid into another steel tank where they were washed. Finally, sleek and shiny as pellets of fresh-blown glass, they slithered down a chute into the mill itself, where three granite grindstones as big as truck wheels, rolling in a circle one after another on a plate of granite, crushed them, pits and flesh and all, into a plum-colored paste. Saverio, who was supervising the milling process, waited until the pulp was the right consistency—he says he judges this mainly by the sound that the grindstones make—and then piped it into a malaxer, a vat with a fan screw turning along the bottom that stirs the pulp continuously, coaxing microdroplets of oil out of the cell membranes of the olives, and helping them to coalesce into larger drops which are easier to extract; the skilled oil-maker mixes the paste just long enough to concentrate its oil without exposing it to the air for too long, which would degrade its aromas and accelerate spoilage. After twenty minutes, Saverio sent the paste into a centrifuge, a steel canister resembling a small jet engine, inside which a drum was spinning at 3,000 revolutions per minute, separating the oil from the olive skins, pits, and flesh. Finally the oil went into a smaller, vertical centrifuge, which removed the remaining water.
Olive oil is the only commercially significant vegetable oil to be extracted from a fruit rather than from seeds, like sunflower, canola, and soy oil. Since the fruit contains considerable water, extraction can be done by mechanical methods alone, with a centrifuge or a press, whereas extracting seed oils generally requires the use of industrial solvents, typically hexane. To remove this solvent from seed oils, as well as to eliminate the unpleasant tastes and odors they normally have, they must be processed in a refinery, where they undergo high-temperature desolventization, neutralization, deodorization, bleaching, and degumming. The end result is a tasteless, odorless, colorless liquid fat. Olive oil, instead, can simply be pressed or spun out of the olive pulp, yielding a fresh-squeezed fruit juice with all of its natural tastes, aromas, and health-enhancing ingredients intact. By the same token, olive oil is the only oil for which the quality of the raw materials—the olive fruit—is of fundamental importance to the quality of the oil. You need prime olives to make extra virgin oil, but you can extract industry-standard seed oil from low-grade seeds.
A narrow tube at one end of the centrifuge emitted a slender, emerald arc of oil. Grazia caught some in a cl
ear plastic cup, handed it to me, then filled another cup for herself. She sipped the oil, frowning slightly, completely absorbed, as if she no longer heard the rumble of the stones and the roar of the motors around us. Gradually her face relaxed in a guarded happiness. She raised her glass to study the oil in the sunlight lancing down from a high window, as if proposing a toast. The oil was a deep, pea-soup green, cloudy with suspended microparticles of olive pulp, invigoratingly bitter. It was warm, and tasted—felt—like pure nourishment, like liquid health. “This makes all the sacrifices worthwhile,” Grazia said. Then her dreaminess faded, and she made a wry face. “Well, some of the sacrifices.”
Though the De Carlo family has made oil for four centuries, the largest of their sacrifices have come in the last three decades. In 1972 they spent a small fortune to drill an artesian well 3,000 meters into the rocky soil, and built the first irrigation system for olive trees in Puglia, substantially improving their olive yield and quality. (Other local producers quickly followed suit.) Seven years later, they were among the first oil-makers in Italy to use a centrifuge to extract oil from their olives, while other producers were still using hydraulic presses not too different from those once employed by the Romans. Again, most oil-makers in Italy who are serious about quality have since switched to the centrifuge system, which not only is more efficient but yields better oil. At the time, though, people told Saverio that he was crazy for risking the family name on newfangled technology—particularly when the first batches of oil he made with the centrifuge turned out to be awful.
“The first year was a disaster,” he remembers. “We couldn’t get the centrifuge adjusted right. The oil was perfect in chemical terms, except that it had too much chlorophyll, and was horribly bitter. It was inedible.” Farmers who had brought their crop to the De Carlo mill each year for generations dismissed Saverio as a hopeless eccentric, and began to mill their fruit elsewhere. The Alfa Laval technician who had designed the centrifuge, mortified by the apparent failure of his machine, committed suicide. But Saverio persisted. He worked day and night with other Alfa Laval engineers, milling crate after crate of olives as they searched for the correct settings for the equipment. Meanwhile he coaxed some of his clients back by reinstalling the presses. “It was tough to swallow my pride and bring the old gear back. But we had no choice. We were going broke.”
By harvest time the following year, Saverio had finally fine-tuned his centrifuge, and he began to make the best oil his family had ever produced. “Our clients started the year using the presses, but they’d stop by and taste my oil from the centrifuge,” Saverio said. “They wouldn’t say anything. Their faces wouldn’t change expression. They’d just taste the oil and walk away. But the next time they came in with a batch of olives, they’d want to use the centrifuge instead. These were the very same people who the previous year had accused me of trying to ruin my family and my father’s good name, with my newfangled contraptions and crazy ideas!”
At the time, the De Carlos were one of a handful of pugliesi to make extra virgin oil. The vast majority of producers in the region were turning out lampante oil, which they made from overripe, windfall olives gathered up off the ground. Lampante oil was sold to refineries, where its unpleasant flavors and odors were removed with heat treatments, activated carbon, and other processes, yielding “refined olive oil,” a clear, tasteless, odorless liquid fat which, with the addition of a small amount of extra virgin oil, is sold in stores as “olive oil.” Saverio De Carlo’s use of the centrifuge helped to begin a technology boom in olive oil production, during which Italian engineering firms like Pieralisi and Alfa Laval invented new systems for olive crushing and malaxing and oil extraction, making quality olive oil progressively easier to produce. The De Carlo family tried them all. Some, like the centrifuge, they adopted. Other systems, like the stainless steel hammer and disk mills now used by many modern producers instead of millstones, proved less suitable: the De Carlos found that the old-fashioned millstones made more delicate oils from their strongly-flavored local coratina olives.
The De Carlos were pioneers in what has become an authentic renaissance in extra virgin olive oil in Italy. Over the last three decades, new oil-making technologies, together with advances in olive botany and agronomy, have enabled skilled Italian producers to make some of the best and healthiest oils in history. Italy is a long, narrow, mountainous peninsula that stretches from the Alps almost to Africa, and contains a remarkable variety of microclimates and soil types, as well as more olive cultivars than any other country—an estimated five hundred of the seven hundred cultivars recognized worldwide. Oil-makers are now using this rich botanical patrimony much as enologists use grape varietals, to create oils with a new subtlety of flavor, aroma, texture, and local personality. Italians are appreciating these brave new oils as never before: public oil tastings and training courses for oil sommeliers are becoming popular, “oil bars” on the model of wine bars are proliferating, and a growing number of restaurants offer an oil list as well as a wine list, that proposes oils of different characteristics to suit various dishes. Elsewhere the olive oil boom is even bigger: during the last fifteen years, consumption more than doubled in North America, trebled in northern Europe, and grew sixfold in parts of Asia.
Despite this flourishing market, however, the De Carlos and nearly all other producers of quality olive oil, large and small, are struggling. Over the last decade, the wholesale price of Italian extra virgin oil—or what is classified as such—has plunged; on the Bari commodities market it currently runs at €2 per kilo, a historic low. The olive-pickers employed by the De Carlos, members of local families whose ancestors have harvested the family’s fruit for generations, are growing too old to work in the trees, and the job is too strenuous to attract their children. The rare art of the olive pruner, whom Grazia calls “the tailor of the countryside, the artist who determines whether you’ll harvest this year or just stand by the window and watch,” is being forgotten. Hundreds of olive oil producers have gone out of business, and unless the prices for quality olive oil improve, many more will follow. Francesco and Marina De Carlo are the only young people they know in this part of Puglia to follow their parents into the olive oil business. “Again and again you run into brick walls—injustices, distortions, and dirty dealing that don’t exist in other industries,” says Marina, whose plump round face and the gap between her incisors gives her an air of childish naïveté, until you hear her on the phone with a client. “I talk with my business school classmates who are working in other professions, and they can’t understand why I stay. Sometimes I can’t either.” The time is ripe to make the best oils in Italian history, but few Italian producers can afford to make them.
Grazia and Saverio, like Flavio Zaramella, blame this contradictory situation on the dubious virginity of most olive oil, in Italy and abroad. To meet the legal requirements for taste and chemical properties of the extra virgin grade, an oil must be made from healthy, expertly picked olives, milled within twenty-four hours of the harvest to preserve their flavors and avoid spoilage. So it’s far more difficult, expensive, and labor-intensive to produce than lampante oil from windfall olives. Yet if law enforcement is lax, extra virgin oil can easily be cut with cheaper oils, made with inferior olives or other substances entirely, creating unfair competition for honest producers. “Some of my customers see that I charge €8 for a liter of oil, a price that barely covers my costs, and they call me a thief,” Grazia said with a bitter smile. “They tell me they’ve just bought a 100 percent Italian, extra virgin oil at the supermarket for €1.90. But behind the fancy label, I want to see what’s really in that bottle, when even lousy, fake extra virgin oil sells wholesale for €2 a liter!”
After our visit to the mill, Grazia and Saverio drove me through their groves in a battered four-wheel-drive Fiat Panda, to show me what it takes—and costs—to make top-quality oil. A gravel road wound among fields ringed with low walls of yellow limestone. The De Carlo lands, which are scat
tered over an area of ten square miles, are divided into tenute, which in turn are made up of smaller contrade, each with its own distinct appearance and history, its own unique oil. Some groves consist of slender twenty-year-old trees in neat seven-by-seven-meter grids, while in others, like the Tenuta Arcamone, hoary grandfather trees grow far apart and are interspersed with other species: almonds, figs with low, reaching branches, grape vines of the local primitivo and aleatico varietals, white and black mulberry bushes, and umbrella-shaped carobs with their long brown seedpods, which produce a sweet, chocolatey paste used in confections. Saverio identified several different olive cultivars, which were hard for me to distinguish by looking at the trees, but easy when I got close enough to see the fruit, which varied considerably in shape and color. These trees included coratina, a popular variety in Puglia, which makes a bitter, peppery oil; the more mellow ogliarola and termite di Bitetto cultivars; and peranzana, originally from Provence, whose fruit can be used for oil and table olives alike. Some trees were hybrids, consisting of a meter-tall trunk of cima di Mola, which is highly resistant to pests and disease, onto which a sprig of coratina, one of the more productive cultivars in fruit and oil, had been grafted a century before and had since grown into a flourishing canopy.
This generous, mixed style of cultivation, which agronomists term “promiscuous,” has been practiced here since classical times. According to Saverio, growing olives from ancient trees in these conditions isn’t just picturesque, but makes distinctive oil; he said that some of the subtle flavors and scents of his oils derive from the pollens which almond trees, mulberry bushes, and other vegetation set adrift in the air, and the substances which they release into the soil. Yet it’s far more expensive to make oil here than in orchards of young trees planted in orderly rows. We parked in the shade of a giant carob, and watched a team of five workers harvesting the last few olive trees at the far end of a field. Two operated a tractor with a vibrating arm clamped to an upper limb of one tree, which shook the olives loose onto a groundcloth spread below. Saverio explained that the trunk and the larger branches were too stiff and fragile to use this method without damaging them, so the rest of the tree had to be harvested using slower manual techniques; since labor costs account for most of the overall expense of the harvest, older orchards are more time-consuming and costly to work. The other three workers were standing on tall ladders propped against the far side of the tree, combing out the olives with hard plastic hooks strapped to their wrists, and with hydraulic whisks with vibrating rubber fingers shaped like large hands. To complicate matters, different cultivars ripen at different times; the De Carlos often pick them separately, and store the oil in individual tanks. Each of these details increases the cost of making fine oil, and reduces the De Carlo bottom line.