by Mueller, Tom
This point was brought home with a number of tastings. World-class chefs prepared a variety of dishes at the cooking station at the front of the hall: Paul Bartolotta of the Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare in Las Vegas cooked his signature triglia alla ponentina, a red mullet encrusted in salt; star Greek chef Christoforos Peskias made a simple yet subtle chickpea soup; and María José San Román from Spain playfully whipped up a banana mousse and a salad of salmon and mango. When they finished cooking, waiters passed through the aisles carrying trays to the spectators, which held nuggets of the food that the chefs had just prepared, along with three gleaming plastic beakers of premier oil: gentle biancolillas, tart cornicabras, big boisterous koroneikis, and other top estate oils made in several countries. The audience tasted the oils on their own, after which the chefs explained how to blend them into the foods, pointing out how oil brought out hidden flavors in the dishes, and how each oil, with its own distinct pungency, fruitiness, aromatics, and mouthfeel, changed the fundamental character of the food in different ways, highlighting the succulent flakiness of the mullet and the floral notes hidden in the chickpea soup, and causing the mousse’s sweetness to linger luxuriously on the tongue.
Occasionally a big-bodied oil would set off little eruptions of coughing, the loudest of which often came from Claudio Peri, the organizer of the conference. Peri is a retired professor of process control and food safety at the University of Milan, and looks it: tall, slightly stooped, with a slender white mustache that he fiddles with when he speaks, and a gentle, hopeful smile, someone for whom rules and procedures are deeply reassuring, even satisfying. At first blush he seems a bit too staid, and, well, professorial, to have dreamed up this three-day carnival of cutting-edge creative thinking about oil. But talk with him awhile and you’ll see telltale flashes of an oil obsession: the mill in the Umbrian hills that his father ran when he was a boy, the dreamy sensuousness he says he feels when olive oil touches his lips, his love of oil’s sacred and mythic dimensions. You begin to sense behind his mild demeanor a sharp thinker and a risk-taker, even something of a rebel, all catalyzed by oil.
“I’d spent my whole professional life teaching theories of food quality and food technology in a university. When I retired, I decided to see if these theories could actually produce something concrete, actually do good in the world outside. It was a kind of challenge I set for myself.”
At the university, Peri had done research in a number of food industries, including wine, dairy products, vegetable proteins, and seed oils. But for him olive oil was the obvious choice as the food with which to bring his theories to life, not only because of his fond childhood memories but for oil’s three unique characteristics, which had long puzzled him. First, despite what he saw as the inherent nobility of the product, oil fraud was rampant and ethics in the industry exceedingly low. Second, olive oil had no widely agreed on parameters of excellence, since the term “extra virgin” had become emptied of meaning. And third, despite the culinary and cultural value of fine oils, making them was rapidly becoming an economic impossibility. The three concepts of ethics, excellence, and economics became the watchwords of his new mission, and the name of Association 3E, the nonprofit organization which he founded in 2004. Through 3E and its members, which currently include eighteen world-class oil producers in Italy, Spain, Greece, and the US, Peri aims to set a new quality standard for great olive oil, which he calls the “super-premium” grade.
To join 3E, a producer’s oil must pass the association’s chemical and sensory tests, which are far more stringent than those prescribed by IOC and USDA guidelines. A 3E auditor documents the harvest of each member company, checks milling procedures, measures the quantity of oil produced, and monitors the stocks in real time in the storage silos until the last drop is sold. But despite these detailed procedures, Peri says, “membership in 3E is less about the quality of oil than about the quality of the people who make, sell, and use it. This isn’t just a certifying agency. It aims to be more like a movement.” In addition to creating great oils, 3E also attempts to help its producers earn better profits, by clearly explaining the superior qualities of their oils to consumers and distributing them through elite sales channels like Paolo Pasquali’s Villa Campestri, the oil bar and restaurant at the Culinary Institute of America, and a handful of other fine restaurants in Europe and America.
In fact, Peri sees the strategic alliance he has formed with the Culinary Institute to be a vital step toward taking great oil into the mainstream. “Olive oil has had enough of the static language of taste panels and the hieratic hocus-pocus of the various olive oil sommeliers. It’s the sensory dialogue between chefs and their customers that will open the road to excellence, which soon will be followed by people in their homes.”
IF KRITSA, CRETE, is the heartland of olive oil consumption, then Jaén, deep in the Spanish south, is the mecca of oil-making. This province of the Andalucía region produces about 500,000 tons of olive oil per year—as much oil as all of Italy. Jaén is covered by an ocean of olive trees that flows across the lowlands of the Guadalquivir river valley, rides up over the rolling hills, and climbs as high as 1,000 meters on the steep mountainsides, wave on wave of trees planted in satisfyingly straight rows. There is no better place to experience the systematic, almost martial rigor with which Spain grows its olives and extracts their oil, an approach so different from the picturesque and haphazard farming of most of Italy and Greece. Over the last half-century, Spanish growers have uprooted hundreds of thousands of ancient olive trees and replaced them with efficient, high-output modern groves. Many of these new trees were planted in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s under El Generalísimo Francisco Franco, the military dictator, who promoted large-scale olive cultivation in Andalucía and other parts of Spain as part of his program to free the country of dependence on foreign food imports. More groves went in during the 1970s, when the Spanish government drew up a series of ambitious nationwide plans to renew the country’s oil-making infrastructure, and still more were planted in the years preceding Spain’s entry into the EEC in 1986, when Spanish farmers and oil-makers became eligible for generous agricultural subsidies.
Yet as in the second and third centuries AD, when this area was the olive basket of the Roman Empire—Monte Testaccio was built mostly with Andalucían amphorae filled with oil made hereabouts—historically Jaén oil-makers have concentrated on quantity, not quality. Ninety percent of the trees here are of the picual cultivar, chosen for its extremely high oil content (20–22 percent by weight); most growers wait until the content peaks, when the olives are overripe and beginning to fall off the trees, then bring down what fruit still clings to the branches with four-wheeled mechanical shakers that maneuver like huge crabs among the trees, and vacuum the olives off the ground with vehicles that resemble street sweepers. About half of the oil made in Jaén each year is lampante, and less than a quarter is extra virgin; of the four hundred mills and cooperatives in the province, only a handful produce fine olive oil. Refineries and pomace extraction plants dot the landscape, their chimneys spouting dense, sour-smelling smoke, and the practice of deodorization is reportedly widespread—it was here that Flavio Zaramella saw deodorizing columns in mills, which are used to remove unpleasant smells and tastes, and turn inferior oils into pseudo extra virgins. Both the picual cultivar and the province of Jaén have become synonymous with low-grade bulk oil; about 80 percent of the oil made here is shipped to Italy, as in Roman times, and sold under Italian brand names.
On a high hill in the heart of Jaén, rising like an island from this olive-green sea, sits the Castillo de Canena, a lowering, turreted fortress built in the Renaissance on the remains of earlier medieval, Moorish, and Roman strongholds. It’s a homey place, with huge hearths and deep comfortable couches and an Italianate loggia along the top of its eastern wall, but its warlike origins are unmistakable: the ten-foot-thick stone walls are hung with spears, shields, and antique firearms, along with several dozen trophy heads of big-gam
e animals shot in forests and savannas the world over. In fact, the Castillo de Canena remains a citadel to this day, and on the morning I arrived in Canena, its master and mistress, Rosa and Francisco Vañó, members of the noble family that has grown olives and made oil in these parts since 1780, were holding a council of war, one of many they have called in their eight-year campaign for oil quality in the heart of Jaén. Rosa and Francisco, siblings in their late forties, sat at the breakfast table with laptops and smartphones crackling, trying to locate an oil shipment that had gone missing somewhere in Asia. The wireless and phone signals were a bit sluggish due to the heavy masonry of the walls, but after an intense half-hour of brainstorming and negotiation, they’d tracked down the oil and sped it toward its final destination.
The Vañó family has made olive oil for over two centuries, but until 2002, it was the low-grade bulk oil typical of Jaén. In that year, Rosa and Francisco left successful business careers in other industries—she as marketing director of Coca-Cola International, he as a senior executive at Banco Santander, the prominent Spanish commercial bank—to begin running the family business together. Since then, with a combination of entrepreneurial flair and slow, meticulous farming, this sister-and-brother team has turned Castillo de Canena into one of the world’s premier producers of extra virgin oil. “We run this company like a little Coca-Cola,” said Rosa Vañó, a handsome, energetic, crisply tailored woman with large, slanting brown eyes, as she crushed the pulp from a tomato over a piece of toasted bread and poured on some of her oil. “In each of the thirty-eight countries where we sell, we draw up a business plan, a marketing plan, a complete profile of our competitors, and an analysis of market trends.” She said she enjoys the challenge of selling olive oil to people in cultures where it’s little known, or even mistrusted. After her experience at Coca-Cola, where she made presentations in English to the corporate board of directors which included Warren Buffett, no negotiation is too ticklish. “I could go to hell and fight for my soul with the devil!” she laughed. She handed me the slender bottle, made in red glass with art nouveau decorations, which apart from its size looked more like perfume than oil. “Try our picual.”
Actually, I had intended to try the other oil on the table, the arbequina, because of my instinctive aversion to picual oil. Most picual made here in Jaén has a distinctive musky stench; this oil is the primary ingredient of many supermarket oils, which have this same defect, known by Italian tasters as pipí di gatto (“cat pee”). Nevertheless, not wishing to offend, I poured Rosa Vañó’s picual over my toast and took a bite. Fleeting flavors bloomed and faded, with an evanescent complexity more like old cognac than olive oil. Here was a stereotype-breaker: a gourmet picual, with a lovely, crisp mouthfeel and perfectly balanced fruit, spice, and bitterness, and no hint of the familiar feline pong.
Rosa Vañó said that when she started working at Castillo de Canena, she found it hard to convince potential customers that their oils were different from the Andalucían run-of-the-mill. “People would say, ‘Oil from Jaén? No thanks, I don’t need any more bulk cooking oil.’ Or they’d say, ‘A high quality picual? You must be kidding.’” To change people’s minds, she paid countless puerta fría (“cold door”) visits to restaurants and food stores. “At Coke I used to drive around in a blue Jaguar company car. I had a personal secretary and thirty people working for me, and a marketing budget of 5 billion pesetas [about 30 million in today’s euros]. It was different when I started selling our oil. I’d go in through the servants’ entrance with samples under my arm. ‘You don’t owe me anything,’ I’d tell people. ‘Just try this.’ One month we only sold €50 worth of oil. We were sitting around this table, asking each other, ‘Do you think all this effort is worth it?’”
A breakthrough came when she left a sample for Jean-Pierre Vandelle, a prominent chef in Madrid. Vandelle called her a short time later. “There has been a mistake,” he said. “You have given me an oil labeled ‘picual’ that is not picual.” When she insisted that the label was accurate, he told her, “Come and see me.” Since then, Rosa Vañó says, Vandelle has become an ambassador for their oil, along with a number of other leading chefs and food critics, as well as a famous bullfighter, an opera singer, and a graphic artist, all of whom have signed a vintage of Castillo de Canena oil. Rosa travels incessantly on four continents, and has developed a strategy for overcoming jet lag using eyeshades, noise-cancelling headphones, carefully timed naps, and fractional doses of Ambien, the sleeping pill. “There are many new markets in the world that have huge potential,” she said. “Even here in Spain, the consumption of good extra virgin olive oil is very low. Ninety percent of Spaniards eat butter on their bread for breakfast. They should be eating our oil instead!”
I took another piece of toast and drizzled the arbequina oil over it, and had yet another awakening. Oils made from the arbequina cultivar are usually low in polyphenols, oleic acid, and personality, but this oil was robust and nuanced, with a hint of green apples and bitter almonds.
“Our arbequina has 250 in polyphenols and 68 percent oleic acid this year, which is unheard-of for the cultivar,” Francisco Vañó said. “We get these levels by stressing the trees, reducing their irrigation—polyphenols are the olive tree’s response to a stress situation. At the same time, we’ve increased the irrigation to the picual, removing some of its natural bitterness and pepperiness, which can be quite aggressive.” (This year their picual weighs in at a whopping 500+ in polyphenols and 80 percent in oleic acid, and a remarkably low 0.07 percent free acidity.) While Rosa travels the world selling Castillo de Canena oil, Francisco stays home in Canena and makes it, on the family’s 1,500 hectares of olive groves and 280,000 trees. “When I worked in the bank I worked hard, but as soon as I left the building at night I was a normal person. Here, I’m an olive oil maker twenty-four hours a day. I’ve become a little like an animal—I often sniff new things as a way of learning about them. The sense of smell gives you a huge amount of information, so many inputs. Until I was forty-two years old, I paid no attention to my nose.” Francisco says that the profession of making oil has an epic quality, because so many factors lie outside his control. “You pray for wind, rain, sun—you’re always praying for something, looking at the sky. This contact with nature makes you more human, more inside the universe. Olive-oil-making is really Homeric.”
It’s also stressful: Francisco’s nails were chewed to the quick, and he occasionally paused, drew a deep breath, and let it leak out slowly through pursed lips, as if to settle his nerves. Rosa, who had recently arrived from San Francisco and would be leaving for Moscow the next day, looked weary, her eyes bloodshot with dark circles beneath.
After breakfast, we drove out of town into the endless groves which surrounded Canena, so even and uninterrupted that it was impossible to tell where one property ended and the next began. It had been raining off and on for several days, and growers had stopped harvesting to let the olives dry out. It was late January, by which time the makers of fine oil around the Mediterranean have long since finished collecting their fruit, but these trees were still heavy with plump black picual olives, and many more had fallen in dark patches around the foot of the trees.
When the Vañós started making extra virgin oil in 2002, they hired a consultant from Córdoba, who instructed them to use only their oldest trees, harvest the olives at maximum ripeness, and strive to produce a homogeneous oil, one that tasted the same from year to year. After their first harvest, Rosa and Francisco brought samples of their oil to a food show and proudly offered it to industry experts. One well-known taster took a sip and asked how many months it had been in the bottle, though they’d made it only two days earlier. “We were humiliated,” Francisco remembered. “That’s when we started to understand that ‘homogeneous,’ that bloody word, was completely the wrong way to think about extra virgin olive oil. The olive tree is a living creature, and produces different harvests every year. Variety isn’t a weakness in good oil, and can actual
ly be a strength.” The Vañós began to study olive growing and oil-making with agronomists and oil experts at IFAPA, a nearby agronomics institute widely recognized for its expertise in extra virgin olive oil. By the next harvest, they were ready for another examination. “I smelled and tasted our oil, and it seemed good,” Francisco said. “But I didn’t trust my own judgment. So I took a sample and drove as fast as I could to IFAPA. I handed it to Brígida Jiménez Herrera, their top taster. She poured the oil into a tasting glass, warmed it in her hands, uncovered it, smelled it, sipped it. She looked up at me. ‘Francisco, es estupendo!’ she said. And I burst into tears.”
