Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

by Mueller, Tom

  IF DINO CORTOPASSI is the epitome of all-American efficiency in the oil business, the prize for the most global vision of oil goes to Mike Bradley, an independent oil producer and trader based in Oakland. Bradley, together with his wife, Veronica, and their two grown children, runs Veronica Foods, a company founded in 1924 by Italian immigrant Salvatore Esposito, Veronica Bradley’s grandfather. The company headquarters is a 160,000-square-foot industrial warehouse near the Oakland dockyards, where the cranes of the port bristle on the horizon. In Bradley’s second-story office you can hear Latino music and whirring forklifts from the shop floor below, where workers prepare pallets of different oils for shipment to specialty olive oil stores, delicatessens, and restaurants across America. On the day of my visit, his desk was crowded with oil samples from producers trying to sell him their product: an elegant red bottle from Castillo de Canena, rustic tins from Italy, Greece, Portugal, Turkey, and Syria, and a screw-top PET bottle filled with oil made in a partially abandoned grove in the nearby Sierra foothills, harvested and pressed by the local high school football team. “There are some great trees in that area, up around Copperopolis, missions and manzanillas and arbosanas planted by the Italian immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who came to work in the gold fields and the mines,” Bradley said. “We’re thinking of setting up a little mill out there. These small farmers are paying fees for picking and crushing of over $800 a ton, which is three to four times the going rate in Europe, and makes their oil expensive beyond all reason—in some cases almost 300 percent above the world market price for extra virgin olive oil.”

  Bradley is sixty-two, with a square jaw and a buzz cut and little round glasses that highlight the brilliance of his blue, true believer eyes. He poured me a dose of what he called a “radioactive koroneiki,” one of his favorites this season, from the Asopos Valley in southern Greece; we both tasted, he doing his unique strippaggio, a two-stroke slurp that sounds like heavy hydraulics at work. We both coughed, hard. Bradley removed his glasses to wipe his watering eyes, and grinned. “Gotta love those whips and chains!”

  Bradley knows the economics of the international oil trade like no one else I’ve ever met. On a desktop calculator (which he seemed not to need) he punched out line by line the impact that agricultural subsidies to European oil-makers have on the price of their oil, which represent an unfair economic advantage over American oil. He detailed the import restrictions imposed by the central European government, which hurt growers in California, Australia, Chile, and every other producing nation outside the EU. “That’s a really strong headwind to do business against,” he concluded. “The most efficient producers in the world outside Europe are barely surviving in this dysfunctional market, and even Europeans receiving EU subsidies can barely make a profit, if they’re making decent olive oil.”

  But in addition to calculation, Bradley’s affinity for oil has poetic and historic depth. He tells with obvious glee the story of Thales of Miletus, the legendary philosopher and mathematician of ancient Greece, who made a fortune in olive oil by correctly predicting a big harvest and renting a number of mills to process it. He recites with admiration the lines from Oedipus at Colonus where Sophocles praises the olive tree, calling it “the gray-green nurturer of children.” Bradley himself has written odes to the olive, like the poem which coalesced in his mind after years of traveling the back roads of the Mediterranean at harvest time, watching entire villages of women and children pick green, red, and black olives and bounce back to the mill with them in battered flatbed trucks:

  CRUSHING GREEN FRUIT

  Even the hungry Starling will not take

  What we suffer to gather;

  Crushing is more heroic than curing

  The green true fruit,

  The clingstone fruit.

  Tight skinned, unyielding;

  Firmer than a morning ache.

  Too muscular for weeping.

  They ride the rocky wagon

  Dressed in burlap,

  Millbound.

  Fragrant is the Miller’s song,

  Precious is the emerald juice,

  Sweet is the bitter fruit,

  A gift from the Goddess

  To the City of Light.

  But all is not fragrance and light in American oil. In the early 1990s, Bradley lost a longstanding customer to an olive oil wholesaler who underbid him by a wide margin, and whose identity the customer wouldn’t reveal. “We were producing premium extra virgin olive oil in our own mill in Tunisia, as well as buying fruit on the tree in different parts of the world and having it custom crushed to our specifications,” Bradley remembers. “So we knew very well what it cost to produce high-grade extra virgin olive oil. And our profit margin was already razor-thin on that key account. Extra virgin olive oil simply could not be produced anywhere in the world at the prices offered by our mystery competitor.” He explained this to his customer, but lost the account anyway. Other customers began to defect to low-priced competition. Bradley heard reports from experienced oil salesmen of oil marked as Italian extra virgin being sold at impossibly low prices in major restaurant supply chains. “More and more we began to feel like we were under attack from hidden but powerful competitors, who had an incredible pricing advantage over us and the rest of the market.”

  Eventually Bradley learned, the hard way, the identity of one of these competitors, and the nature of the product that they were passing off as extra virgin olive oil. In order to help a client with a sudden shortfall of organic olive oil, he called a major oil trader in Los Angeles, one of the few people in California who could deliver the required quantity on short notice. When eighty drums of oil arrived in a tractor-trailer from down south, Bradley took what he thought were ample precautions to ensure its authenticity, tasting and chemically analyzing numerous samples, all of which were fine. Over a year later, however, his customer notified him that certain lots of the oil had turned out to be adulterated. Bradley checked a retained sample from his bottling run and, sure enough, found that refined oil had been mixed with extra virgin in that lot. When the oil had arrived from Los Angeles, Bradley had only tested the first and last few drums of oil from the load; he speculates that drums in the middle of the shipment contained the adulterated oil. “We’d resold the oil itself long before. All that was left was the retained sample, and the gut-wrenching realization that we’d been had.”

  Bradley became obsessed with oil fraud. He began testing olive oils and blends on the market, spending tens of thousands of dollars in laboratory fees and identifying a number of dishonest producers. With the help of a hired investigator who frequently passed himself off as an oil buyer, he pieced together the linkages between these producers and their clients, food companies large and small, which in turn were selling huge quantities of counterfeit or mislabeled olive oil to the ingredients and baking industries, to restaurants, hospitals, nursing homes, schools, and the US government.

  Yet no one was interested in his findings. He spoke with officials at the FDA in Oakland and at the California Department of Agriculture in Sacramento, but neither office took action. No lawyer would take the case, because the main fraudsters reputedly held their earnings in offshore bank accounts, which would be difficult to access even if they were successfully sued. Most discouraging of all, Bradley found that many clients of dishonest oil dealers, when informed that they were buying adulterated oil, said they didn’t care. “Yeah, we know, but it’s cheap, and that’s what our customers want,” the oil buyer for a nationwide supermarket chain told him. “I’m not here to change the world.” Some buyers became aggressive with Bradley, advising him to mind his own business. “The whole anti-fraud thing started to consume me,” Bradley remembers. “My wife said she was worried about my sanity.”

  While remaining convinced that something had to be done about the fraud, Bradley redirected his energies into quality. He had already made fact-finding missions to the Mediterranean. In 1995, during a trip to Tunisia,
he’d formed a partnership with Habib Douss, a Tunisian American chemist; together they bought an olive grove at Monastir on the central Tunisian coast, near the ancient Roman city of El Djem, and built a technologically advanced mill complete with nitrogen-flushed storage silos. Now Bradley intensified his travels in the Mediterranean, making extended trips, which he refers to as “pilgrimages,” through the major production regions of Spain, Italy, Greece, and North Africa at harvest time, sometimes for months on end. He toured groves and watched harvesting, milling, and storage, and tasted as many oils as he could lay his hands on. “I wanted to find out where the good stuff was coming from,” he says. “I was after the where, what, when and how of fine olive oil—where the olives are grown, what cultivars and chemistry they have, when and how they’re processed.”

  After several years of travel and experience, Bradley figured he’d finally cracked the quality code. But oil held another big surprise in store. “By then I’d built a great network of suppliers, whose work I’d seen, tested, and trusted. I finally knew what the term ‘extra virgin’ meant—or ought to mean—and understood the essentials of making first-class oil: healthy fruit, processed immediately after harvest in a clean facility, properly stored, and bottled at the last minute, just before sale. I knew what efficient production looked like.” He began to identify what he considered the great, archetypal oils from around the Mediterranean, and to form alliances with mills that could deliver these oils in large quantities.

  No sooner had he created this tidy world of olive oil, however, than it was demolished by the arrival of a large wooden box from Mildura, Australia, sent by a recently formed company he’d never heard of, called Boundary Bend, which wanted him to buy their oil. Bradley’s previous experiences with Australian oils had been uninspiring, so he put off opening the box for several days. Finally he did, and discovered an array of tiny vials containing a dozen different oils, each neatly labeled with its cultivar, chemical composition, and taste characteristics. “It was late May or early June,” Bradley remembers, “and most of the European and Californian oils were beginning to soften, to lose their fresh-crushed aroma and fruity profile. I tried one of these Australian oils, which had been made only a week or so earlier. I tried another, and another. They were amazing, all of them: bright, fresh, crisp, and grassy green, with strong pepper finishes. I’d spent eight or ten years working out where to buy the best oils in the Mediterranean, and here was this noisy thing in the room that was better than any oil I had. I was literally trembling—at first I didn’t want to accept what I was seeing and tasting.”

  Until that moment, Bradley had overlooked what might be called the antipodean advantage: being six months out of phase with the northern hemisphere, olives properly harvested and crushed Down Under during May and June, the antipodean fall, make oils that are at their best just when northern oils are beginning to lose their legs. Soon he was off to Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, and South Africa, to complete his oil education. “Once I got the two-hemispheres thing going, I fully understood that freshness is the key to great oil. From the moment the olives are crushed, the aging starts, and the oil begins to lose its magic. The taste and essence of what’s in the bottle is all I’m interested in, not what’s written on the label. Provenance is often used as a marketing device.” Finally, Bradley was ready to share his global vision of olive oil quality with the world.

  Today Bradley imports over one million gallons of premium, single-cultivar extra virgin oil each year, from twenty countries around the world, a portfolio of about seventy oils that changes with each harvest, which he sells wholesale in ten-liter boxes (like Paolo Pasquali, he insists on bulk storage as the best way to minimize oxidation and preserve oil quality). Bradley is now the exclusive supplier to a rapidly growing number of specialty food stores and oil bars across America, and teaches regular seminars in extra virgin olive oil for store managers. Each year for the last three years, his business has doubled. Many of his customers do little or no advertising, relying instead on word of mouth—and on the selling power of great oil. “We virtually insist that shoppers sample the oils before buying them, and we teach them to ask the right questions,” Bradley says. “When they put it on their tongue, the light goes on, they get it immediately. We’re witnessing a paradigm shift in the olive oil business. It’s like experiencing the rebirth of olive oil. Finally, consumers are beginning to realize that oil is made from fresh produce, and that expiration dates measured in years rather than months are a cruel joke.”

  In January 2011, Bradley and his family opened Amphora Nueva, their own oil store, in Berkeley, where the walls are lined with antique and replica Roman amphorae like the ones from Monte Testaccio, as well as panoramic photos of the groves where Bradley sources his olives, and banks of gleaming stainless steel fusti containing fifty great single-varietal oils from around the world, each labeled with the cultivar name, taste profile, and chemical analysis. I stood with him at the grand opening, as crowds of curious oil newcomers read the unfamiliar words aloud off the fusti, sipped oil, coughed, laughed, and questioned Bradley and his staff. “There’s a renaissance happening here, that not even rampant fraud can stop,” he said.

  ED STOLMAN, inventor of the Dove bar, likes to say he’s had fourteen careers, and has made money in all but one of them. Stolman is an entrepreneur in the classic American mold, gregarious, well-connected, and infectiously big-picture, and can hardly help making money. He has worked in hospital management, invested in real estate, run a volunteer ambulance service, renovated the city centers of historic towns in Tennessee, where he grew up, and made ice cream, and has prospered every time. So when the IRS noticed a fifteen-year string of losses that he’d reported at the Olive Press, the oil mill and shop he owns with several partners in the countryside not far from Sonoma, they became suspicious. “They called me in, and were pretty tough with me at first,” Stolman remembers with a sunny smile. “Then I told them my story. By the end of the meeting, the agents had tears in their eyes.” This year, his sixteenth in the business, he has finally turned a profit in olive oil, though he might still be in the red if it weren’t for some help from Oprah Winfrey.

  I met Stolman at the Olive Press, which is housed in a faux-Tuscan palazzo owned by Jacuzzi Wineries, near the wine-tasting room. The Mediterranean, particularly Tuscany and Provence, is a recurrent theme of conversation in these parts, and a favorite destination for long, leisurely journeys. (Stolman himself lives in another Tuscan-inspired villa, in the hills above nearby Glen Ellen, surrounded by his 1,000 olive trees.) So in 1995, Stolman and a group of other northern California residents, most of whom had accumulated comfortable fortunes and were looking for something to do, decided to make olive oil, a Mediterranean icon. They traveled together to southern France on a scouting trip to learn about milling, and visited Pistoia, not far from Florence, to order several thousand trees, which arrived in San Francisco harbor a month later wrapped in huge rolls of damp burlap. That day they held a big party in gazebos on Stolman’s property—dwellings hereabouts are referred to as “properties,” not “houses,” and most deserve the term—complete with opera music, prosecco, and Italian flags. Then the partners took their shares of the trees back to their properties, and planted them.

  Somewhere along the way, Stolman and several others of the group, which also included Nan McEvoy, a newspaper heiress, caught the oil bug, and began to make oil that was first good, and then superb. Olive Press oils have won more national and international awards than any other oil in America. But the company still wasn’t profitable. “I don’t think there’s a producer in the state who is making money in olive oil, at least the honest way,” Stolman says. He is trying to marshal governmental action to tighen up laws and push enforcement, through his various contacts in the state capital and in Washington. So far he’s had little success.

  Still, in a series of fortuitous events that mostly seem to happen to outgoing and well-connected entrepreneurs like Ed Stolman, the
TV financial guru Suze Orman began shopping at the Olive Press. Before long she mentioned their oil to her friend Oprah Winfrey, and it promptly made the O List, the catalog of gift recommendations that Oprah has compiled each Christmas and publicized in her show and magazine. The resulting spike in sales finally nudged the Olive Press into the black.

  Stolman walked me around the showroom. The Olive Press is a place you instinctively want to spend hours in: warm-lit and wood-paneled, filled with a profusion of attractive and interesting objects and the murmur of happy browsing. The oil bar contains a dozen ready-to-taste oils arranged from mildest to most full-bodied, as well as oils infused with lemon, basil, parmesan, and hot pepper. The bottles are sleek and the labels memorable, and there are oils in slender little aluminum cans as well that are custom-made in Austria. On shelves and tables around the room are other things made from and for oil—soaps, tapenades, cruets, fusti, and olive oil ice cream—all carefully positioned by the marketing director, Christine Harrison, formerly of Victoria’s Secret, to evoke a sense of bounty, yet order.

  I tasted the oils, one by one, starting with a soft-spoken mission and ending with a screamingly peppery coratina. I’d been expecting a letdown after the Olive Press’s high-profile marketing, but these oils were sublime, every one so fresh and spicy and distinctive it made my teeth hurt. Who had made this oil?

  In the back wall of the room was a door with a plexiglass window in it, through which the mill was visible, a shiny one-ton Pieralisi. The harvest was in full swing, and the machinery ran twenty-four hours a day. Five people were hard at work loading olives, checking the malaxer, measuring temperatures, adjusting valves, and performing the hundreds of other tasks that milling is made of, which together determine whether an oil will be great or mediocre. In their midst was a slender woman with a red bob and a pale, pretty face a bit like a china doll’s. As I watched, she called one of the workers over. No sound came through the plexiglass, but she was clearly correcting a small error he had made. Something in the set of her mouth, the lips a little pinched, and the way the worker leaned forward attentively toward her while she spoke, like a slight bow, made her seem faintly intimidating.