by Mueller, Tom
But each day, Bertolli faces a more insidious kind of crime. Every shipment of oil that arrives at the Inveruno facility is tested at least eight times for adulteration, starting with a probe dipped into the tanker trucks as they arrive at the factory to detect hidden compartments, and ending in the company’s oil laboratory, among the most sophisticated in the world, where a battery of chemical tests is performed. De Ceglie showed me the lab with obvious pride, pointing out its impressive range of mass spectrometers and other high-tech devices, some of which cost over $500,000. Naturally, now and then even Bertolli makes mistakes, as in 1991, when they and other major olive oil companies bought oil from Domenico Ribatti that had been adulterated with hazelnut oil, and resold it to consumers as olive oil. But Simone Domenici, Bertolli brand manager, told me that Bertolli rejects as suspect about 70 percent of the oil it receives. This oil soon finds another buyer, however. “It doesn’t get tossed in the river,” Domenici said. “Someone else bottles it. As extra virgin, naturally.” With their state-of-the-art laboratory, De Ceglie said, “We’ve made an impregnable fortress for oil. But the rest of the market is, let’s say, fairly permeable.”
The trickiest kind of fraud to detect is deodorization—inferior olive oil that has been processed at low heat to remove unpleasant odors and tastes. De Ceglie indicated that sophisticated and hard-to-identify deodorati are made by mysterious companies which sometimes possess the same level of chemical know-how and advanced equipment as Bertolli itself, whose identity he clearly suspected, but wouldn’t reveal for fear of lawsuits. “Well, we’re talking about criminal charges here, so I have absolutely no names for you. But let’s say they could be trading companies, brokers, refineries, and so forth that can do these things.” He said that Bertolli is constantly developing new test methods to detect fraud, while its shadowy foes dream up ever more inventive new frauds. “It’s a continual game of cops and robbers. With us on the side of the cops.”
“They also know our limit of detectability, and they adjust the oil,” added one of the lab technicians, who had been listening to our conversation. “Because they don’t just give us pure deodorized oil, they mix it in such a way that we’re always—as far as they’re concerned . . . at the end of the day . . .” She exchanged looks with De Ceglie, and her voice trailed away.
Much of the oil that Bertolli rejects as potentially adulterated will be bought by their competitors, the most cutthroat of whom these days are discount supermarkets, which sometimes sell “extra virgin” oil at under €2 per liter. A recent chemical and sensory analysis of discount extra virgins by the food quality laboratory at the University of Bologna, headed by noted olive oil chemist Giovanni Lercker, determined that 70 percent of the oils sold below €3 per liter were actually not of extra virgin grade, and probably contained deodorized oil. Bertolli views these discount oils as the biggest threat to their sales. “By breaking down the natural defects of these oils, deodorization is habituating consumers to this flat taste,” Simone Domenici told me. “When a consumer tries a robust oil, very rich and fruity, they say, ‘Oh no, this is a bad oil!’ He’s become used to the flat taste of the deodorato. And what’s happened there is the worst thing that could possibly happen—the incredible value of the extra virgin olive oil category has been destroyed.” Domenici said that the practice of deodorization was “penalizing both us and the consumer.”
Here is an ancient lament. The Garda oil-makers of the seventeenth century accused dishonest Venetian merchants of corrupting German palates with substandard oil, and makers of high-quality oil like Andreas März and Grazia De Carlo blame Bertolli, Carapelli, and other big brands for doing the same thing, selling “gentle” oils that erode the consumer’s taste for authentic extra virgins. A swift and widespread dumbing-down of olive oil quality has occurred, which in the end is everybody’s loss.
Still, Bertolli employees know good oil when they taste it. De Ceglie took me into their panel testing room, where a world map on the wall was marked with hundreds of locations where Bertolli buys oil. They have analyzed and recorded the tastes and aromas that each of these oils should have at a given time of year, which helps them to select good oils and to unmask frauds. “You need both the taste test and chemistry—they’re two sides of the same coin,” De Ceglie said. “Once I know that in a specific season a coratina oil must have a certain taste profile, when I taste it and it’s much sweeter, something’s wrong.”
We sat in the tasting booths and an assistant brought us three of the many thousands of oil samples which the Bertolli taste panel would try during the course of the year. We tried a splendid racioppella from the area near Benevento, with hints of artichoke and chicory, a coratina with a serious bitter bite and a strong aftertaste of almonds, and a milder Greek koroneiki with notes of fresh-cut grass. De Ceglie and his colleagues tasted the oils expertly, slurping and rolling their eyes with obvious pleasure.
We tasted nothing from a Bertolli bottle, however. Unlike these unblended oil samples, each so characteristic of a specific locality and harvest, Bertolli oils are mixed to fit rigid taste profiles. “We know what our customers expect, every time they buy a bottle of our oil. And that’s what we give them. The great art of Italian oil-making consists in producing a consistent product from a huge range of different oils that change constantly throughout the year.” Bertolli must also produce enormous quantities in order to satisfy its high-volume customers, such as Walmart. He said that the smallest quantity of oil the company would buy was a tanker truck, or thirty tons; he remembered, during his years traveling the oil regions of the world as a buyer for Bertolli, his hard negotiations with the big Spanish cooperatives, which produced so much oil and had such enormous storage facilities that they could drive a hard bargain. The situation was reversed in Puglia, where oil-makers and agricultural cooperatives had invested so little in storage silos that, as the olio nuovo began to arrive during the harvest, they frequently didn’t know what to do with the previous year’s oil. “It was a delight to go and buy there,” he remembers. “The producers didn’t know where to put the oil, and I basically named my own price. It was absurd.”
High volume, intense price pressure, and an identical product every time—Bertolli extra virgin olive oil is a textbook commodity. Not long after my visit to Bertolli, Unilever sold the company to the Spanish oil and fat conglomerate Grupo SOS, which had recently purchased Carapelli and several other historic Italian brands as well. A substantial part of the oil sold under Grupo SOS’s Italian brands now comes from Spain, though marketing campaigns still stress their Italian origins. “These companies have basically become just bottling plants for Spanish oil,” one former Carapelli executive told me. But Grupo SOS has its own troubles, due to plummeting oil prices, the economic downturn in Spain, and the company’s lawsuit against its former heads, Jesús and Jaime Salazar Bello, which alleges fraud, money-laundering, misappropriation of €240 million in company money, and other misdeeds. (The case is currently being heard before the Audencia Nacional, a Spanish national court in Madrid.) The company, burdened with debt and a plunging stock price, has sold Dante and other brands to raise working capital, but this may not be enough. More recently, in February 2011, investigators of the Nucleo Agroalimentare e Forestale, a food quality corps of the Italian Forest Service, say they discovered falsified transport documents in four Grupo SOS offices in Florence, Reggio Emilia, Genoa, and Pavia, regarding 450,000 liters of olive oil valued at about €4 million. Prosecutors hypothesize that these documents were altered to conceal the real nature of the oil, which, instead of being extra virgin, they say may have been low-grade olive oil containing deodorized oil, worth three times less. (The Florence district attorney is investigating the accusations, though so far no charges have been brought against Grupo SOS.)
ON MAY 12, 2009, having considered Carapelli’s request for damages against Andreas März because of his article in Merum, and heard a statement by März’s lawyer in his defense, the presiding judge in the case,
the Honorable Luciano Costantini of the district court in Pistoia, near Florence, read his verdict.
Carapelli’s accusations against März, Costantini observed, regarded five statements that he had made in his article. He reviewed each statement in turn.
1) Like the majority of supermarket extra virgins, samples from the Carapelli oil factory, in Florence, were also judged to be inferior. The taste panels of the Florence Chamber of Commerce have determined that the Carapelli extra virgins are incorrectly labeled. Independently from the tasting done by the experts of the Chamber of Commerce, the inferior quality of the Carapelli oils was confirmed by another official panel (ARPAT in Florence).
“Regarding the first affirmation,” Constantini said, “the accused has described the events in a manner that corresponds entirely with what actually occurred.”
2) Instead of classifying its oils correctly, the Carapelli group, based in Florence, takes aim at the individual expert.
“Regarding the second affirmation, it is demonstrated by the documentation provided to the court, and by statements by the witnesses themselves, that Carapelli S.p.A. brought suit against Marco Mugelli, director and leader of the panel, and Laura Mazzanti, head of the chemical analysis laboratory of the Florence Chamber of Commerce, at the public prosecutor’s office in Florence on September 23, 2004.”
3) If the press is critical of the anarchy that reigns in the olive oil oil business, then it must be silenced, and the most effective way to do this is to intimidate the experts.
“Regarding the third affirmation, the opinion expressed by März regarding the judicial action undertaken by Carapelli S.p.A. appears entirely legitimate, also in light of the results of the preliminary investigations that have been carried out, and the requests for damages made in the libel suit [brought by Carapelli]. One must also note that [Carapelli’s] opposition to a settlement of the proceedings by decree indicates an explicit desire, not merely for restitution of damages suffered, but for the punishment of those who might eventually be found responsible, leading the accused to believe that the suit was brought with punitive intent.”
4) So long as smelly, rancid oils and first-rate oils with the perfume of fresh olives bear the same name, quality producers in Italy and throughout the Mediterranean have no possibility of covering their costs.
“[Regarding] the fourth affirmation, . . . the lesser quality of the oils was determined by the analyses done in Florence at the chamber of commerce and ARPAT, from which result the various negative characteristics of aroma and taste expressed with the terms ‘smelly’ and ‘rancid.’”
5) The leaders of the oil industry know what a clear differentiation among oil quality grades would mean for them. Putting consumers in the position to be able to choose between quality and quantity could threaten their sales. Carapelli apparently wants to avoid this threat by filing suit against one of the most inflexible and independent experts: Marco Mugelli.
“Regarding the fifth affirmation, the observations made in point three above, regarding the motivation behind the judicial action of Carapelli S.p.A., apply here as well.”
“Andreas März carried out his journalistic investigation scrupulously and diligently,” Justice Costantini said, before concluding, “The court pronounces März Andreas Anton innocent of the crime of which he is accused, because the crime itself did not occur.”
Moments after the sentence, Andreas März was ecstatic. “We’ve shown them! The judge confirmed my statements word for word! This is just the beginning!”
A week later, though, he had returned to earth. “The verdict got no coverage in the Italian press—nobody picked it up. No lab or panel will do tests in the future, after the ruckus I kicked up here. And even if they were willing to test, no private citizen will dare to bring them any oil.” His voice was a monotone, and had grown softer as he spoke. I could barely hear his last three words: “Nothing has changed.”
FOOD REVOLUTIONS
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 107
“Too much love kills, even more than hatred. That’s what we’ve done to olive oil. Our reaction to it is totally visceral: oil belongs to the most sacred things, which are paradoxically the first things that we vilify. ‘Grease the palm,’ ‘Oil the works’—oil has become a synonym for corruption.”
I’m sitting with Paolo Pasquali, in a broad, low-ceilinged room with an antique breakfront and an enormous, age-sleeked table that came from a church sacristy, and a holy water stoup against the wall with a tap over it that spouts olive oil. He calls this place an oleoteca. “Wine has the enoteca, and the wine cellar, but until now, oil has had nothing analogous. It wouldn’t be the mill, of course, which is a noisy, aggressive, stressful place, where people rush to process as many kilos of olives per hour as possible. So I created the oleoteca. It’s a place of merry holiness, where you can enjoy oil in its multiple tonalities—mythological, scientific, and culinary.”
Pasquali taught philosophy at the University of Florence, and quotes Aristotle, Aquinas, and Lévi-Strauss with an intensity that reveals how their words have shaped his mental warp and woof. He also trained as a musician, and made a fortune as an entrepreneur in publishing, then sold his business for another fortune just before the Internet swallowed it. He’s handsome, with the jutting chin and hooked nose of a battle-hardened condottiero. Now he’s trained his Renaissance-man energies on the art and science of making great olive oil, in a place where the arts and sciences have melded in creative ways for centuries. He owns Villa Campestri, a thirteenth-century estate in the Mugello, the hill country north of Florence, where he makes oil from small groves in various parts of the property. The Mugello has been called the cradle of the Renaissance: Giotto was born around the corner, Fra Angelico up the road, and philosopher Marsilio Ficino taught and wrote among the olive groves of nearby Cafaggiolo, the ancestral home of the Medici. Pasquali believes the time is ripe for a modern renaissance of olive oil, based on a new philosophical and aesthetic understanding of great oil in the twenty-first century.
To begin with, he says, the language we use to talk about oil is all wrong. Olive oil labels, with their opaque references to production methods and oil chemistry, give the consumer no sense of what the oil will be like to eat, and no desire to find out. Pasquali thinks no better of official taste testers, who brandish spiderweb charts of sensory characteristics and spout terms borrowed from lipid chemistry, “as if they were nurses trying to talk like doctors.” Pasquali finds that even the basic words people use to describe olive oil are charged with unwanted meanings, and need to be retooled. “Pungent” and “bitter” have far more positive connotations in the Mediterranean than in North America, for example, where they sound harsh to many people. In China, “eat bitterness” is an ancient curse.
“We must reclaim the nobility of language which oil has lost. The language of music, for example, which is the natural way to speak about beauty. We talk about an oil’s ‘floral notes’ or its ‘harmonious’ structure, instinctively borrowing from the musical lexicon.”
Before his talk grows cloying, Pasquali hops to his feet, because like all Renaissance men he’s also a man of action. He walks to a console on the wall built in gleaming copper and stainless steel, which despite its modern materials fits with the thirteenth-century decor. He takes three tulip glasses, holds them one by one under the three spigots of the console, and out come three green and gold ribbons of oil, three different extra virgin experiences. He invented this device to shelter fine olive oil from its three worst enemies: oxygen, heat, and light. It’s part of a new business model Pasquali has devised, OliveToLive, which he says will allow restaurants and stores to serve the highest-quality olive oil, and to make a profit doing it.
“Oil is the opposite of wine. Wine ages, o
il goes bad. The instant an oil is bottled, the decay accelerates. Bulk oil is the only way to go—super-premium bulk oil.”
This console, he explains, contains three light-proof vessels that preserve the oils in an oxygen-free environment, at 16 degrees Celsius, the optimum temperature for oil storage, until the moment it’s served. Oil that’s kept in the OliveToLive system, which has been installed in a handful of high-end restaurants and oil bars in Italy and the US, maintains its freshness and sensory qualities longer than bottled oil.
Pasquali fills three more glasses, then brings all six back to the table, where he sets three in a line before me, and keeps the others for himself. He tells me to start with the gentler oil, made at the McEvoy Ranch near Petaluma, California, and then work up to the more pungent and bitter oils from Andalucía and from Pasquali’s own trees. He cups a glass in the palm of his left hand and cranks it around with his right, to warm it. I do likewise. He shoves in his sizable nose, and breathes.
While we snuffle and muse over the oils, Pasquali describes his personal education in the substance, which, as with most things he does, has been hands-on. He’s made oil at Villa Campestri for the last five years, and participates actively in the milling, the harvest, and the year-round care of the trees. “When I first started, I’d go out with local farmers, the oldest ones I could find, and spend the whole day with them among the trees, pruning or hoeing or picking. I found they were able to talk about oil for eight straight hours, and saw that olive oil must have a power even greater than soccer! They had the oil bug, and I caught it.”
