Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

by Mueller, Tom

  Down through the end of the twentieth century, Spaniards continued to run the monastery and care for its olives. Dom Paulino, the last of them, arrived in 1928 as an eighteen-year-old. “He was a remarkable man, incredibly resourceful, with a beautiful heart and mind,” Gordon Smyth remembers. “And you should have seen him scream around on his quad bike—he’d really go tick!” Dom Paulino taught Smyth the traditional harvesting and milling methods of the monastery, which often employed generations-old equipment. He introduced Smyth to the grove’s benchmark trees, venerable giants which, through the condition of their fruit, signalled when to start the harvest. The monks knew these trees by name: Clarence, whom Smyth describes as “a stiff-upper-lip, public school kind of tree, with a ‘don’t mess with me’ attitude,” and Rosa, who is “like an Italian lady, lovely, graceful, and robust.”

  Nobody knows which cultivars the Spanish monks of New Norcia brought over from their homeland. Many trees died during the ocean journey, and as Gordon Smyth says, those which survived the salt air of the voyage “were as tough as old boots by the time they got here.” Over the last 150 years, in the antipodean sunshine and the breezes off the Indian Ocean, these trees have grown apart from their Mediterranean ancestors and are now considered a separate cultivar, the West Australian mission olive. Similarly, since taking over from Dom Paulino, Gordon Smyth employs a new, native Australian approach to making oil at the monastery, based not only on the age-old sensibilities of Spanish Benedictines but on his own experience in the groves of South Australia, where he grew up. To start with, Smyth thought the trees had grown unmanageably tall and dense, and gave them a vigorous pruning. “I opened them up like cocktail glasses, to let the light and air in. People used to go all swoony walking among the trees. They really shuddered when I pruned them back. But I told them, ‘You just try going up in a cherry-picker at seven or eight meters off the deck in the winter wind, mate! I’m here to make great oil.’” He stopped using the old mill on the monastery grounds, and began processing the fruit at a modern facility in the nearby town of York. And he started relying on his instincts. “I use the senses God has given me to tell how the trees are doing. I close my eyes and run my hand down the foliage. Is the leaf slightly inverted, starving for water? Is it sticky, or full of dust?”

  When harvest starts in May, at the beginning of the Australian autumn, Smyth pinches and prods the olives that arrive in crates from the groves, rejecting any fruit that is mushy or damaged by birds. He squeezes juice from an olive now and then, to examine its color and viscosity, and tastes raw olives to judge their levels of bitterness and pepperiness. Finally he lays them out on a sorting table and, with a painter’s eye, tries to create the assemblage of colors that will make the best New Norcia oil. “I want the right palette in the fruit between green, on the turn, and fully ripe. If it’s not just right I tell someone, ‘Go out and get greens, pick ten crates!’ We work to that recipe.”

  Smyth’s New World perfectionism is paying off; last year the monastery’s oil won four awards at national olive oil competitions in different parts of Australia. “To continuously improve the product is what the Bible is about,” he says. “I’m applying that fundamental idea in my oil-making and other agricultural work. I represent the monastery and its long history here. Hopefully someone will come and carry on when I’m gone, and make it even better.”

  I asked Smyth if he had traveled in the Mediterranean, heartland of the olive tree, where Dom Paulino and earlier generations of monks at New Norcia had learned to make oil. Did he have any plans to visit Spain or Italy, to study olive growing or oil production?

  He sounded as if he’d considered this question before. “Listen, the stars look great at night around here,” he said. “How good does the caviar have to be? I have no desire to have an overseas experience.”

  OLIVE OIL came to Australia, just as it spread everywhere else in the world where olives can grow, with a series of voyagers from the Mediterranean: missionaries, explorers, and conquistadors in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, followed in the eighteenth and later centuries by wave upon wave of immigrants and merchants. Everywhere these wide-eyed, ambitious, and lonesome people went, they brought oil from their homelands and planted olives, sometimes grafting them onto hardy local relatives of the olive that grew there. Olive trees now climb the slopes of Table Mountain in South Africa, dot the hot plains of northern Argentina, and ring the Hauraki Gulf in New Zealand, familiar Mediterranean shapes rising against horizons once alien to them.

  Olives grow throughout Australia, from the steamy subtropical forests of Queensland in the northeast to the cool subarctic plains of Tasmania to the south, and on out past the arid Red Center to the Karri country of Western Australia. Though the monks of New Norcia have been making oil since the 1850s, large-scale modern olive cultivation in Australia began in the 1980s, the years of the so-called “oil fever,” when the federal government offered substantial land grants, subsidies, and tax breaks to growers. Soon the demand for olive oil, originally low except among the large populations of Greek and Italian immigrants in the big cities, began to grow, thanks to IOC promotional campaigns, cooking shows on television which popularized Mediterranean food, and an increasing interest in healthy natural products. Growing demand, in turn, stimulated production. Today Australian companies produce 18,000 tons of oil, making Australia one of the largest producer nations outside the Mediterranean, and Australians eat far more oil than they make. Australian oil companies are among the most technologically advanced in the world, and have developed new orchard practices and oil-making techniques; the country’s largest producer, Boundary Bend, manages 2.5 million trees, exports its flagship oil to fifteen countries, and builds Colossus, a huge, state-of-the-art mechanical harvester. Top Australian companies are making superb oil at competitive prices. Some have Mediterranean names like Mark Kailis and Felice Trovatello, but their outlooks are distinctively New World. And they’re beginning to question the Old World order.

  As the Australian oil industry has grown in skill and size, local producers have pushed for existing laws against unfair competition to be applied to some supermarket extra virgins imported from the Mediterranean, which they point out don’t measure up to the legal definition of the extra virgin grade. With a measure of government support, some oil fraudsters have been prosecuted, while CHOICE, the magazine of an independent consumer association, has conducted a series of surveys of supermarket oils, most recently in 2010, all of which have revealed that close to half of supermarket extra virgins in the country are mislabeled. Some critics go further, and question the basic definition of extra virginity as enshrined in IOC guidelines. “The chemical requirements set by the IOC are a complete joke,” says Richard Gawel, a chemist and oil blender who formed the first IOC-certified taste panel in Australia and frequently judges international oil competitions. “Take the free acidity level of 0.8 percent, for example. Olives can fall from the trees and lie on the ground for five months before milling and still come in below 0.8 percent! Peroxide levels—a measure of the oxidation state of the oil—are set at twenty, but trade buyers of extra virgin olive oil wouldn’t touch an oil with a peroxide higher than twelve with a barge pole. Levels like these serve one purpose: to sell a lot of old or poor-quality oil and put money in people’s pockets, at the expense of the consumer.”

  Modern Olives, a lipid laboratory in the state of Victoria that has become one of the most respected olive oil labs in the world, has started applying new tests, known in chemical shorthand as DAGS and PPP, to detect old and illegally deodorized oils. The IOC claims these methods are flawed and refuses to include them in their official testing protocols, but Gawel says he has never seen a peer-reviewed reference to problems with DAGS and PPP. “I think it’s all crap. There’s nothing wrong with these tests, it’s just a case of the IOC wanting to maintain their stranglehold on olive oil testing. They have proposed an alternative test to these, but in fact that test has had less scientific scruti
ny than the ones that they have been criticizing. The EU subsidizes producers to stockpile a lot of oil when prices are low, and it sits in the tank for a long time. Sophisticated tests like those proposed can detect this practice. I’d be surprised if the suppliers of these back-blended oils weren’t concerned at the adoption of these robust and sophisticated tests, which can detect the practice of back-blending of old oils.” In 2011, the Australian and New Zealand official standards organization will draft stiff new standards for olive oil quality, which include DAGS and PPP, another step in the country’s steady move away from the Mediterranean.

  Where does the definition of “extra virgin” come from? Who gets to decide? Throughout the new worlds of oil, these questions are being asked by producers who are starting to challenge the Mediterranean hegemony over oil. True, they only represent 2 percent of world olive oil production, but that share is growing, especially in the high-quality end of the market. What’s more, precisely because of their relative inexperience and small size, these newcomers are free from certain age-old prejudices and economic obligations that encumber the oil business around the Mediterranean, and they may be able to see the question of olive oil quality more clearly. They are everywhere, and form a rising chorus, each country and region with its own original and evolving history of oil, its own collection of the individualists and eccentrics who always seem to gravitate to olives. But potentially the most important new world of oil is California. Today the state produces under 3,000 tons of oil per year, a sixth of Australia’s output, and a seventieth of the Puglia region of Italy alone. Yet California is the fifth-largest agricultural economy on earth, and part of a nation of 300 million people, many of whom are just beginning to discover the joys of great olive oil. In 2009, America overtook Greece as the third largest olive oil consumer in the world, and the potential for further growth is enormous, considering that the average American eats only 0.9 liters of oil a year—half of Australian consumption, and 4 percent of that of the Greeks. If Americans learned to love oil even half as much as the Italians, the US market would far exceed Greece, Italy, and Spain—the world’s three leading consumer nations—combined. “Australia has helped set the new quality agenda, but there are only 23 million of us,” Paul Miller of the Australian Olive Association says. “America, with 300 million strong, has a vital role to play in taking this agenda global, and making it stick.”

  IN LIFE on the Mississippi, published in 1883, Mark Twain recounts a breakfast conversation he overheard aboard a steamboat between two “drummers,” or traveling salesmen, whom he describes as “brisk men, energetic of movement and speech; the dollar their god, how to get it their religion.”

  One of the salesmen holds out a slab of butter on the end of his knife and says, “Look at it—smell of it—taste it. Put any test on it you want to. Take your own time—no hurry—make it thorough. There now—what do you say? butter, ain’t it? Not by a thundering sight—it’s oleomargarine! . . . You can’t tell it from butter; by George, an expert can’t.”

  His company has found a way to turn the excess fat from slaughterhouses into an imitation butter that costs far less to make than the real article: “We can sell it so dirt-cheap that the whole country has got to take it—can’t get around it, you see. Butter don’t stand any show—there ain’t any chance for competition.”

  His companion, not to be outdone, pulls out two bottles of olive oil. “There now, smell them, taste them, examine the bottles, inspect the labels,” he says. “One of ’m’s from Europe, the other’s never been out of this country. One’s European olive-oil, the other’s American cotton-seed olive-oil. Tell ’m apart? ’Course you can’t. Nobody can. . . . We turn out the whole thing—clean from the word go—in our factory in New Orleans: labels, bottles, oil, everything.”

  He explains that his company is taking cottonseed oil, extracted from the waste products of cotton gins, altering it chemically, and selling it as olive oil to the guileless consumers on his beat: “We turn out an olive-oil that is just simply perfect—undetectable! We are doing a ripping trade, too—as I could easily show you by my order-book for this trip. Maybe you’ll butter every-body’s bread pretty soon, but we’ll cotton-seed his salad for him from the Gulf to Canada, that’s a dead-certain thing.”

  “Cotton-seed was comparatively valueless in my time,” Twain remarks, “but it is worth twelve or thirteen dollars a ton now, and none of it is thrown away. The oil made from it is colorless, tasteless, and almost, if not entirely, odorless. It is claimed that it can, by proper manipulation, be made to resemble and perform the office of any and all oils, and be produced at a cheaper rate than the cheapest of the originals. Sagacious people shipped it to Italy, doctored it, labelled it, and brought it back as olive oil.” This shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic, Twain says, provided import stamps from US customs that lent an air of authenticity to the fake oil, enabling dealers to earn “no end of cash” from it. Subsequently, however, these “sagacious people” further perfected their system, and found a way to procure customs stamps without going to the trouble or expense of exporting and reimporting their oil.

  By 1883, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border, much of the olive oil that Americans were eating on their salad was fake, the product of systematic fraud.

  THE FIRST olive oil importers to the New World were the conquistadors, for whom, as for their contemporaries in Spain, olive oil was a crucial food, fuel for lamps and engines, and active ingredient in medicine and religious rites. Spanish explorers packed quantities of olive oil, together with wine, salt pork, sardines, raisins, sandals, and weapons, in each ship they sailed to the Americas. As in Roman times, when the legions planted olives wherever they were stationed, olive trees grew in the furrows of the conquistadors’ swords, becoming a vivid symbol of conquest. Olive oil dazzled the indigenous populations with its myriad beneficial properties (the Aztecs, devotees of the sun, admired the brilliance of Spanish olive oil lanterns), and became, together with Toledo steel and Arabian stallions, an emblem of technical and cultural superiority. Olive groves were planted in royal encomiendas and reducciónes in Mexico and Peru, and soon after in Argentina and Chile. Some of these first arboreal immigrants to the New World still stand, like el olivo viejo (“the old olive tree”) at Arauco in northeastern Argentina, one of several trees planted shortly after the conquest. However, after the initially rapid spread of olive cultivation and oil-making, the Spanish government curbed olive production in the colonies, in order to prevent American-made oil from competing with Spanish oil—to keep the New World hungry for Old World oil.

  Since olive oil, the main ingredient in chrism, was also a vehicle, literally as well as allegorically, for the spread of Christian doctrine and divine grace, holy oil became a symbol of the conversion of the indigenous populations to the Christian faith. Religious orders planted olives in their settlements throughout South America; as the missionaries moved northward, so did the trees. In 1769, Fray Junípero Serra and a group of fellow Franciscans introduced olives to North America when they founded a mission with an olive grove on San Diego Bay. Over the next half-century the Franciscans founded twenty-one more missions along the California coast, each with its own grove of olive trees of a cultivar that subsequently became known as “mission,” still among the most widely-grown in California. Olives were also planted in America by the eager hands of a Founding Father. Thomas Jefferson first saw olive trees on a trip by muleback across the Alps in 1788, and was entranced, marvelling at how they “gave being to whole villages” and calling them “the richest gift of heaven,” as well as “the most interesting plant in existence.” Jefferson promptly began an olive plantation in South Carolina. He imported several gallons of “virgin oil of Aix” each year for the rest of his life, and saw to it that an olive branch, heavy with fruit, was placed in the talons of the eagle on the Great Seal of the United States.

  In the latter part of the nineteenth century, new ambassadors of olive oil arrived in the
Americas. Waves of immigrants fled impoverished southern Italy for the New World, only to find that their new homeland lacked one of their most beloved foods. Some entered the olive oil trade to make good this deficit, and ended up turning a nice profit as oil importers. Giuseppe Profaci was born in Villabate, Sicily in 1897, emigrated to America in 1921, and eventually founded Mamma Mia Importing Company in Brooklyn, New York. By the 1950s, the company was the leading olive oil importer in America and Joseph Profaci, as he now called himself, was known as the “Olive Oil King.” But Profaci actually seems to have made most of his fortune in less savory ways: drug trafficking, loan-sharking, extortion, prostitution, and where necessary, murder. Joseph Profaci was a leader of La Cosa Nostra, and was described by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy as “one of the most powerful underworld figures in the United States.” (Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, used Profaci as a model for his protagonist gangster Vito Corleone, and gave Corleone his own olive oil business, Genco Pura.) Profaci was one of many Italian American mafiosi who used the olive oil import-export trade as a front for criminal activities.

  One of his sons, John J. Profaci, founded Colavita USA, the American subsidiary of the Italy-based olive oil company run by Leonardo Colavita, which makes one of the leading olive oil brands in America. John Profaci is still chairman emeritus of the company, which he runs together with his four sons. (Profaci points out that his father died over a decade before Colavita USA was formed, and says there were never any links between the company and his father.)