Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

by Mueller, Tom

  By now we were driving through the Vañó groves. Rosa and Francisco described their harvest routine, which begins in early October, when they collect samples of ten to fifteen still-green olives from representative trees, produce test batches of oil using a tiny custom oil-making machine, and analyze each batch for flavor profile and chemical properties. When the test results are right, they quickly harvest all the olives for their “First Day of Harvest” oils in an eighteen-hour blitz, then pick the fruit for their Family Reserve oils in the days that follow. We saw the experimental grove which they’d planted three years ago, containing forty-five different cultivars from around the world that they would begin harvesting the following year. “We’re going to find out, scientifically and for the first time, which olives produce the finest oil in our soil, altitude, and climate,” Francisco said. “When we do, we’ll plant a lot of the three or four best cultivars. And in a few more years we’ll start making premium blends with them—not blends with olives that happen to be growing on our land, as most producers do, but the best blends possible.” They’re also planning to start an oil-making operation in California, where they’ll focus on native cultivars, like the mission olive. “California wouldn’t be a new market for Spaniards like us, but a return to an old one,” Francisco laughed. “After all, when the Vañó family started growing olives in 1780, California was part of the Spanish crown.” They showed me their irrigation system, which employs a novel technology developed in Australia, and their new solar farm. They spoke of the close attention they pay to their carbon footprint and to water conservation. “We’re looking twenty to thirty years into the future,” Francisco said, “starting projects that we’re hoping our children and grandchildren can continue.”

  Driving back to the castle, we passed mile after mile of muddy roads and fallen, rotting olives. The rain began again, making the landscape even more desolate. It had been a difficult harvest, Rosa explained, and these rains only made it worse—as did the current economic crisis in Spain, which is particularly acute in Andalucía, where unemployment is close to 30 percent. “It’s hard to see a way of life that has been a livelihood for fifty years come to an end,” she said, scanning the sodden groves. “Profit margins are disappearing in low-end oil made like this. Bulk oil is dead.” The Vañós know the bulk oil market well. Though their company concentrates on making superior extra virgin oil, they continue the family business they took over in 2002, which also produces low-grade bulk oil in a separate mill. In volume, this oil represents 95 percent of their production, though high-quality extra virgin oil already accounts for a quarter of their profits.

  I ask about a recent open letter to the Spanish environment minister, Rosa Aguilar, written by a number of trade organizations representing the nation’s bottling companies and oil producers. In it, the signatories complained about a chemical and sensory test of fifty extra virgin oils that the Andalucía regional government had performed in Spanish supermarkets not long before, which revealed that half of the oils labeled “extra virgin” were in fact virgin or lampante, leading to product seizures and widespread negative press. The signatories condemned the taste panel as a subjective and unreliable method, and demanded that the minister immediately halt its use in determining olive oil quality. The signatories represented big Spanish oil bottlers and producers like Grupo SOS and the giant growers’ cooperative Hojiblanca, but the letter had also been signed by INFAOLIVA, an association of olive oil producers to which Castillo de Canena itself belongs.

  “They’re trying to drive down the quality of extra virgin oil to the lowest common denominator, to turn olive oil into a commodity,” Francisco said. “Farmers in Jaén continue to make their oil the cheapest way possible. They still don’t believe they’ll be paid for quality, or understand that making true extra virgin-grade oil is the future of the industry.”

  I asked why these organizations, faced with plummeting profits in the bulk oil business, didn’t start making quality oil like Castillo de Canena does. “They have the resources,” Francisco replied. “They could hire fifteen Francisco Vañós, or fifteen people better than me. But they don’t, and their few attempts in premium oil have been failures. They don’t feel the passion, which is the only way to make great oil. It’s not just the money—we aren’t making nails here. We have to put in so much passion and faith, so much love. In the end, I think they are afraid of us.” He fell silent, as if he’d just had this idea, and found it shocking.

  It was raining hard when we reached the castle. Rosa Vañó said goodbye and trotted to her car; she was driving to Madrid, to catch her Moscow flight early the following morning. Francisco offered to show me around the castle. We saw the cellar with its Moorish and Roman masonry, where two dilapidated horse-drawn carriages stood covered in dust, slowly collapsing into the earth. We walked through the ballroom, the dining hall hung with sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries, and the loggia with its view over rainy Canena. We peered into rooms tucked away high in the castle towers, which seemed not to have been opened for weeks, perhaps months. Now and then Francisco paused to study a network of cracks forming in a masonry arch, or a patch of plaster that had fallen from a ceiling far above, reminders of how much upkeep this ancient, 2,500-square-meter building must require. Everywhere the herds of dead game animals on the walls stared their glassy stares, interspersed with oil paintings and photographs of past generations of the Vañó family, looking down at us proudly, inquisitively.

  “I’m not a hunter,” Francisco said with a touch of impatience. “These are my brother-in-law’s trophies. Rosa won’t allow them in their house.” As if to explain his aversion to violence, he pointed out the wedding portrait of his grandfather, for whom he was named, and said that soon after the photo was taken, his grandfather was shot by one of Franco’s firing squads, in the first months of the Spanish Civil War. The family portraits continued, men in morning suits and women in ballgowns, as well as photos of Francisco’s and Rosa’s children, now in their teens.

  Meeting their gaze, Francisco said, “Rosa and I feel that our ancestors have given us the mandate. They’re telling us, ‘You have to do things better than we have done.’ We love this job, but we both agree that we don’t want to work this hard, day and night, for the rest of our lives. Someday we want to be able to hand on the company to the next generation. And somehow we feel that if we can’t manage that, we’ll have a lot of explaining to do.”

  Then, as if continuing his earlier thought about fear in the oil business, he added, “I suppose we are afraid, too. In the last few years, the economic crisis in Spain and the crisis in Spanish oil have driven down the quality of mass-market oil, but they’ve also forced quality producers to differentiate, to innovate. We can’t afford to stop working, stop making our oil better and better, or we’ll be swallowed up.”

  BILL BRIWA, chief instructor at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone, the Napa Valley campus of the largest cooking school in the world, stood at a blazing range, pointing a gun into a pot of olive oil. Briwa was measuring the heat of the oil with an infrared thermometer as it rose to 220 degrees Celsius, the smoke point for most olive oils at which they begin to break down and to produce an acrid bluish smoke. Every ten degrees he spooned some of the oil into a saucer, marked it with the temperature using a yellow Post-it, and set it on an adjacent counter. He processed four different olive oils this way, three extra virgins of varying qualities and a refined oil, as methodically as master chefs know how to be. By the end of the experiment there were forty saucers in four neat rows on the counter. He was ready to taste them, and to learn something new about cooking with olive oil.

  “I’ve read all kinds of contradictory opinions about frying with olive oil,” Briwa said. “Some people say it’s good to use because it has a high smoke point and holds up well chemically to heat, others say it’s better to use peanut or palm oil instead. Oftentimes the only way to tell fact from fiction is to try it at the range.”

  He handed me
a spoon, and we tasted the four oils in series, ascending the temperature scale, pausing now and then to clear our palates with sparkling water. After trying the first few samples, Briwa said, “This tastes like popcorn!” All the others did too—flat, browned, faintly nutty—even those that had been cooked at moderate heats, including the very best extra virgin he’d used, a high-priced Spanish oil. In fact, the Spanish oil was the worst, since cooking had driven off all of its subtle flavors and aromatics, leaving an overbearing bitterness that made it almost inedible. The oil that had changed the least, predictably, was the refined oil, since the flavorful elements of the extra virgin oils, which suffered in the heat, had already been removed from it at the refinery. “I can’t speak for the chemistry or nutrition, and I’d need to test a lot of other oils to say anything definitive,” Briwa concluded, “but for now, cooking at high heat seems a waste of good olive oil.”

  Briwa, whom I met at the Beyond Extra Virgin conference in Verona, is like most cooks a big fan of fats, which play leading roles in the kitchen. They dissolve and amplify flavors, soften foods by entering into and weakening their cell structures, create soft, creamy textures, and cook at temperatures well above the boiling point of water, which crisps and browns the food surface. But thanks to its complex flavors and aromatics, Briwa says, “great olive oil is the queen of fats, a multiplier of flavors that creates a long-lasting taste of joy.” He likes playing with unusual pairings, such as olive oil cooked in and poured over sweets. “There’s a huge difference between eating a rich chocolate ganache, and eating that same dessert with a fine oil poured over it. The oil gives depth and complexity to the sweetness, and adds a fresh, green sensation of health. Now it has a ‘grown-up’ flavor profile, becoming something to really savor, not just 800 calories to ingest mindlessly. Things should taste good but also think good.”

  Briwa admits he has a lot to learn about olive oil. “I still find myself cooking dishes and then going to look for the right oil to put on them, instead of considering the oil as an integral part of the dish, and choosing it before I start cooking.” Many top chefs feel the same, and are left speechless by their first encounter with excellent oil. Paul Bartolotta, who also attended Beyond Extra Virgin in Verona, vividly recalls his initiation into extra virginity, during an impromptu meal in a cave in Lucca beside an active olive press. “They’re cooking grilled baccalà and bean soup and fett’unta right there while they’re making the oil,” Bartolotta remembers, “and they’re pouring the fresh oil all over the place, and the oil is dripping everywhere and the whole room smells of it, until I want to rub it in my hair and all over my body—I’m so in love with this moment! And I’m thinking, ‘Where do I get this oil? How do I share this experience with my clients?’”

  If you can’t visit Bartolotta’s cave in Lucca, a good place to learn about oil is a restaurant where the chef has a range of quality extra virgins, and knows how to pair them with foods. Big oils, like big wines, can seem harsh and intimidating to the fledgling taster. “As a chef I can take a client by the hand and reassure them that where they’re going is a good place,” Briwa says. “I start with some olive oil and they cough, but then I give them some olive oil sorbet, and they like that. Then I get them to add a little olive oil on top of the sorbet, then a little more. These are lessons that people will take home with them, and pass along.”

  In April 2010, to foster this kind of guided learning and experimentation, the Culinary Institute installed an oleoteca or oil bar, which Briwa took me downstairs to see. Visitors sat along a broad stainless steel counter, tasting oils dispensed from a slightly upgraded version of Paolo Pasquali’s invention. (As at Villa Campestri, the oils are all 3E-certified, and are rotated regularly to provide a maximum diversity of styles.) The manager of the bar, Patricia Donnelly, was talking to an elderly couple in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, explaining the characteristics of the oils and how to use them on the sampler of foods she had brought.

  At the bar we were joined by Greg Drescher, strategic director of the Culinary Institute, a sharp dresser with a melodious, crowd-pleasing voice, who clearly thought of olive oil in long-range strategic ways. “Part of our mission at the Culinary Institute is to provide the best culinary education in the world, and great olive oil is a fundamental part of that education,” he said. He explained that American cuisine is undergoing a rapid transformation—“the old saying ‘American as apple pie’ has less and less meaning”—and that a major challenge for olive oil in the United States would be to find roles in Latin and Asian cuisines, which are beginning to set the new culinary agenda.

  I listened, and watched the people in Hawaiian shirts ooh and aah at the oil bar. The Institute is visited by 300,000 people a year, Californians and tourists alike, along with 4,000 chefs in training. Often their experience at this counter must transform their understanding of olive oil. Yet I couldn’t help thinking of the De Carlos in Puglia, and the thousands of growers like them around the Mediterranean, who are barely able to cover their costs in a market awash in low-priced imitation oils, and who will probably never sell their oil here. And I thought of people in the Midwest, of America and every other consumer nation, for whom the Culinary Institute is as inaccessible as that magic cave in Lucca where Paul Bartolotta had his oil epiphany—people who simply can’t get good oil, or even get oil that’s actually made from olives.

  I mentioned these people to Drescher, the suffering farmers and the oil-deprived consumers, the unanointed masses. And I asked, trying not to be snide, how this glitzy oil bar in Napa would improve their lot.

  Drescher looked at me evenly. Working with the Harvard School of Public Health, he played a key role in codifying and communicating the Mediterranean diet in America in the early 1990s. He has spent years travelling the Mediterranean. He has seen the endless groves of Andalucía, and the ancient trees of Crete beside the pale green sea. He has been in Puglia at harvest time, and shared meals with the harvesters.

  He shrugged, and said simply, “What we’re doing here, will help them there. Excellence is contagious.”

  NEW WORLDS OF OIL

  Picking the olives,

  Marriages are made.

  If you don’t go to the harvest

  You’ll never fall in love.

  What power must they have, Mother,

  In matters of the heart,

  The olive trees?

  —Andalucían folk song

  Kangaroos sometimes bound through the olive groves of New Norcia, a Benedictine monastery in Western Australia not far north of Perth, but they don’t harm the trees. Parrots are the real problem, the great noisy flocks of black cockatoos and pink and gray galahs that swoop down on the groves around harvest time and gobble the green olives. “It’s really frustrating,” says Gordon Smyth, the head of grounds at the monastery. “Dom Paulino used to say that shooting five birds a day would affect their numbers, but personally I think you’d need five shotguns firing continuously to make any difference.”

  Smyth recently took over responsibility for olive cultivation and oil-making from Dom Paulino Gutierrez, a Spanish monk who managed the groves for decades until shortly before his death in 2010, at the age of ninety-nine. The brothers of the New Norcia community, which is located in the dry, fertile Victoria Plains, fifty miles inland from the Indian Ocean, have grown olives and made oil for over a century, led by a series of Spaniards that stretches back to the founders of the mission, bishops Rosendo Salvado and José Serra, who arrived in Perth harbor on a sailing frigate in 1846 and set to work converting the Noongar Aboriginal people to Christianity. In the first year of their work, Salvado and Serra lived the nomadic life of their Aboriginal hosts; sometimes, when their familiar monastic victuals ran out, the reverend fathers got by on bush tucker—grubs, tubers, lizards, and the occasional opossum. With the help of an Aboriginal guide, they eventually located a promising site along the Moore River, where the monastery stands today. They began clearing the native eucalypts, river gums, and wandoo
trees and planting familiar Mediterranean crops like figs, wine grapes, bitter oranges, and a large olive grove. Soon they had created a self-sufficient Christian community, which they named after Norcia in faraway Umbria, the birthplace of St. Benedict and of St. Sanctulus, the sixth-century priest who taught pagan Lombard millers how to use holy (or boiling) water to extract olive oil.

  Bishop Salvado kept three bottles of oil in his church, which are now visible in the New Norcia museum, each blessed for different uses: oil of catechumens for anointing converts before they were baptized, chrism oil for the baptismal rite itself, and oil of the sick to heal wounds and comfort the dying during extreme unction. The oil of the sick was particularly famous for its therapeutic powers. In his diary, Salvado describes how he and Bishop Serra cured an Aboriginal boy they’d found lying half dead in the bush with a spear through his stomach—“a wound so bad that the only thing we could do for him was to prepare him for death.” The bishops cleansed both the entrance and the exit holes with oil, and eased him into bed; to their amazement, after nine days the boy had recovered completely, and trotted back into the wilderness. (Not that olive oil was the only cure at the monks’ disposal—when suffering from severe abdominal pains, Salvado himself recovered on a diet of parrot soup and bread dipped in Communion wine.)

  As in Benedictine monasteries everywhere, olive oil also served the monks in more mundane ways, as soap, for hair care, and above all as nourishment, to be eaten with their bread. The oil made at New Norcia has been first-quality from the monastery’s earliest years, receiving a high commendation at the 1886 Indian and Colonial Exhibition in London, and soon after being praised in the Western Australia Settler’s Guide and Farmer’s Handbook, published in 1897, whose author called the monk’s table olives “a treat,” and wrote that their oil was “real Simon pure . . . no cottonseed here.” The monks of New Norcia imported olive trees and seeds from Andalucía and Sicily, and during frequent trips to the Mediterranean they studied the agronomic methods and oil-making techniques being used in Spanish, Italian, and French monasteries, which they later employed to improve their oil back in Australia.