by Mueller, Tom
“That’s Deborah,” Ed Stolman said. “When it comes to making oil, I’ve learned just to do what she says.”
We walked through the door, passing from the fragrant serenity of the showroom to the roar and fluster of “the crush,” as Californians call the milling season. (This term, which captures the act as well as the intensity of milling, is far more appropriate than the verb “to press,” which is passé nowadays, since virtually all good oil is made with centrifuges, not presses.) Deborah Rogers, the master miller of the Olive Press, doesn’t like to leave the mill during the almost four months it runs at full capacity, not even at night, and though she sometimes drags herself away, by the end of the season she’s badly sleep-deprived. “Deborah is very passionate about her home, family, and making healthy food,” says her husband, Doug, “but during milling season she becomes somewhat of a ghost. Even when she’s standing right in front of you, she is usually a million mental miles away.” Rogers says she trusts her staff, but is always concerned that something will go wrong and spoil a batch of oil, or a split-second adjustment will crop up that requires her advice. “This is like living four months in a pressure cooker,” she half-shouted over the noise. Her expression, though, was happy.
Rogers studied horticulture but her real passion was food, ever since she learned to cook as a girl with her Polish grandmother, preparing kielbasa and kapusta and rolling out dough for homemade pierogi while standing side by side in the kitchen. “Our house smelled amazing, fragrant with cooked onions, cabbage, and dried mushrooms sent by my grandmother’s family back in Poland,” Rogers says. “She would tell me stories about immigrating to the US and the various jobs she worked to support herself. She was quiet and stoic and very stern. I learned so much from her—my early passion for gardening and growing my own food, wasting nothing, and the joy of cooking from scratch using only the freshest ingredients.” Even as a schoolgirl, Rogers was so fascinated by food that she’d pretend to be sick so she could stay home and watch The Galloping Gourmet.
She discovered olive oil in a little store in St. Helena, near Napa. “It was the tiniest, cutest, Old World family store I’d ever seen. The owners would fill the half-gallon jug and stick on a label, often a little crooked. I got a great feeling just going to that store to get oil. I decided to do something horticultural and culinary at the same time: make olive oil.”
In 1993, she sold her house and used most of the money to buy five acres of land in Glen Ellen, to plant olive trees. Then, not wanting to delay her entry into oil-making for the five to seven years that the trees would need to fruit, she contacted two bulk oil dealers and bought a 55-gallon drum from each, plunked them down on the living room floor of her tiny new apartment, and started bottling her own signature blends. “It was a mess. I didn’t have a drum pump, so I siphoned the oil out by mouth, sitting on a milk stool between the drums. Then I hand-bottled them, but the first time I bought the wrong-sized corks, so I had to drip wax over them to seal the bottles.” The system worked, though, because at the next farmer’s market her oil stand, set among a dozen or so people who actually made oil from their own olives, drew the biggest crowds, and she sold out her entire stock of wax-corked signature blends priced at $18 a half-liter. Business grew rapidly, and soon she was able to quit her day job and devote herself to oil. (She never did plant olive trees on her land in Glen Ellen.) “But I still didn’t know what good oil tasted like,” she admits.
That began to change in 1995, when she traveled to southern France with Ed Stolman and a group of other northern California residents, the future partners of the Olive Press. Significantly, she remembers less about the oil she tasted than about the mills she saw. “I walked into one mill and was amazed by how clean the machinery was, a big modern Pieralisi. The air smelled clean, too, with no trace of rancidity. That was an awakening.”
Back in California, Rogers continued making her blends, though occasionally she was reminded that buying other people’s oil had its risks. In oil from one of her suppliers, from whom she’d just bought twenty drums, she noticed red flecks and large black blobs, and had the oil tested. The laboratory found paint chips, feather barbules, and rat feces, though the identity of the black blobs was never determined.
Soon the Olive Press partners imported their trees from Pistoia, bought a modern hammer mill, and started making oil, first with olives they purchased from local growers and then, after their trees fruited, with their own. As she’d learned cooking from her grandmother, Rogers mastered milling standing long hours at the side of several mentors, the few self-taught masters of the craft in California at the time. She says the key to great milling is the ability to see, hear, and react to many things at once. Some people, she finds, have the knack, and others don’t. “Restaurant guys get it. They know how to perform, and actually thrive, under pressure. In fact, the satisfaction of milling is a bit like short-order cooking. When things in the kitchen are humming and you’re getting all the plates up there in the window, and the diners are all happy—it’s a high, and quite addictive.”
Rogers walked me over to the malaxer so she could check the progress of the latest batch. The reddish-brown paste glistened with tiny droplets of oil, which were beginning to pool in larger green puddles in the folds of the paste. The warmth and the smell steamed up invisibly from the paste, aromas and aromatics dancing like angels in my nose. I could almost feel the green on my face.
“That’s leccino,” she said, gazing at the paste. “See the clumpiness, how beautifully it’s setting up? And the gloss of the oil? Leccino is a miller’s dream.”
Rogers said she’d worked so long and hard at the Olive Press, nose to the millstone, that she hadn’t traveled much. Yet olive oil had brought her together with many talented and intriguing people from distant lands, who had come here to the mill or whom she’d met at oil tastings and competitions. “Oil is like a universal language wherever you go.”
In fact, she told me, she was going into semi-retirement after this harvest, so she could travel the world and visit these far-flung friends. Given her unmistakable love of milling, this surprised me. I asked where she was going, and she listed her destinations, naming the oil friends first and then where they lived. There were many Australians and New Zealanders, and quite a few Chileans and Argentinians, too. She mentioned no one from the Mediterranean.
“Of course, I’ll still be running the Olive Press mill each harvest,” she added. “I’m just going down south when things get quiet around here.”
Then I saw. She was heading south to follow the olive harvest. She was chasing the crush.
PROBABLY THE ONLY small producer in California to defy Ed Stolman’s dictum and make a regular, honest profit from olive oil is Mike Madison, and he’s done it with no help from Oprah. Educated at Phillips Andover and at Harvard, where he earned a PhD in botany, he took a job as a plant collector for the Harvard Botanical Museum, roaming the rainforests of South America, sometimes for a year at a time. Eventually, when what had been a big adventure began to feel too much like hard labor, he returned to his hometown, Davis, and bought twenty acres of prime farmland on Putah Creek, near a farm where he had lived as a child.
Madison, a wiry sixty-three-year-old with a short brown beard and a baseball cap, claims that his modus operandi in farming is “trial and error followed by error and error,” and that his motto is “aim low.” Yet as I walked with him around his farm on Putah Creek, his real plan appeared more and more to be “aim right.”
Madison has made money in oil each year since 1991, when he planted his first trees, by keeping his costs almost incredibly low. Instead of hiring a contractor to put up a new building for his olive mill, he bought an abandoned barn for one dollar, deconstructed it with a chainsaw and a crowbar, and reassembled it on his farm. Instead of buying a fancy mill from a big-name manufacturer, he hired three men in a shed in Perugia, who also liked to work with their hands, to build him a custom mill. “This mill has thirteen motors,” he said, laying
his hand on it like a stockman with a champion stallion. “If the sound changes in any of them, I know something’s going wrong.” And while most growers hire a crew to harvest their olives, he hand-picks them himself during the day, and runs his mill at night. “This is strictly a one-man operation,” he says. “It takes me ten or eleven weeks of ten-hour days to harvest 1,500 trees.”
When it comes to selling his oil, Madison is equally frugal. He has no website, he doesn’t ship his oil, he doesn’t advertise, he doesn’t even have a telephone. He sells most of his oil at the farmers’ market in nearby Davis, at modest prices, and gives the rest to the local food bank. His total investment for the trees, a drip irrigation system, a half-ton-per-hour mill, a building, and plenty of stainless steel tanks for storing his oil, was $98,000. “Most people putting together that package would spend eight or ten times that amount. And if you’ve spent three-quarters of a million dollars to set up a small operation, you will never make a profit in olive oil.”
Olives and oil fit Madison’s larger aspiration to farm, and to live, at a pre-Industrial Revolution pace and scale. “I set the price of my oil low enough that people hopefully won’t be inhibited from using it liberally. I sell most things within ten miles of here. This style of commerce is a throwback to the eighteenth century, when most trade took place between people who knew each other, and knew what to expect from each other. Nowadays virtually everything you buy is made by strangers, who need to impress you with pretentious bottles and fancy labels and high-priced marketing, and all the awards they’ve won. But if you’re selling to people you know, you don’t need all that.”
Madison chooses his crops with care, and only grows the ones that seem right to him. He doesn’t grow sweet corn with the new sh-2 gene which boosts the sugar content of the kernels, because, as he says, he likes his corn to taste like corn, not Cap’n Crunch. Other crops he grows—quinces, almonds, and tart heirloom Wickson apples as small as a five-year-old’s fist—all fit this pattern of complex, tart, even bitter, rather than sweet. Olives and their oil do too. “The bitterness of fresh olive oil is rich and interesting, and lingers on the palate. Like music in a minor key, it sets a mood of contemplation and regret.”
Yet Madison also recognizes, and heartily enjoys, the slippery side of oil. As we stood among his trees, heavy with taggiasca olives just like those that were growing on the old tree near my home in Liguria, he told the story of an oil-maker he knows, good-hearted but bumbling, who ran a shabby mill north of Davis and somehow managed to win top prize at a major competition.
“Soon after, two Sicilian gentlemen showed up with a fat sales contract and offered him twice what the mill was worth. He pounced on the offer, because he didn’t really like making oil anyway. The Sicilians took that prizewinning label of his and began slapping it on bottles of rancid, fusty oil of doubtful origin. They didn’t even use the mill, which they abandoned; for a time it was used to dump old cars. Trouble is, buried deep in that sales contract was a clause that allowed them to annul the sale and return the mill to the seller within two years, which they promptly did. They left that guy with a broken-down mill and a millyard strewn with car carcasses!”
He chortled as he remembered the story, shaking his head. “When a product sells for a hundred dollars a gallon or more, the temptation to fraud must be nearly irresistible.”
EVERYONE IN the oil business in California, and in America, knows a fraud story, because everyone knows a fraudster. The United States, whose oil consumption is third in the world and is growing at 10 percent annually, a market worth over $1.5 billion and climbing, has long had some of the loosest laws on earth concerning olive oil purity, and the new USDA standards passed in October 2010, which mirror the lax regulations of the IOC, remain voluntary, with no provision for enforcement. The United States of America is an oil criminal’s dream.
A recent survey of supermarket extra virgins performed by the UC Davis Olive Center, in cooperation with the Australian Oils Research Laboratory, revealed that 69 percent of oils tested had taste flaws such as rancid, fusty, and musty, which meant they weren’t extra virgin oils at all, and had been mislabeled. (The California oils surveyed weren’t perfect, either.) Such cases of “legal fraud” are common in American supermarket oils, as they are in many parts of the world: similar findings were reached by Andreas März in Germany, by CHOICE magazine in Australia, by the regional government of Andalucía, and by documentaries on Swiss and German television about extra virgin quality in those countries. “We’ve pulled olive oils off the shelf,” says Paul Vossen, a University of California oil specialist, who beginning in 1997 trained and then led America’s first IOC-recognized tasting panel, “and I would say very seldom do we ever find one that passes as extra virgin.” The same is often true at gourmet retailers and websites. “Price is by no means an indicator of quality,” Vossen says. “The high-ticket items can be equally bad.”
In the wholesale market, a lot of oil is adulterated outright with cheap vegetable oils. After years of lab testing and observation, Mike Bradley concludes that “the market is awash in counterfeit olive oil to the point that most legitimate sellers have given up trying to sell the real thing to wholesale suppliers or restaurants. It is rare to find authentic extra virgin olive oil in a restaurant in America, even in fine restaurants that ought to know better. It’s nearly impossible in some localities, such as southern California, where large-scale counterfeiters pump out blends of low-grade olive oil and soybean oil dyed bright green, and sell it to their fences, the big-name ‘legitimate’ wholesalers.” John J. Profaci, chairman of Colavita USA, says such buyers are motivated merely by low prices, not by quality, and are “as responsible as the adulterators” for the prevalence of fake olive oil on the American market. “Because if I’m offering my extra virgin olive oil at $5 a bottle and somebody comes in at $3, the buyer’s got to say, ‘You know what? Something’s wrong here. There can’t be such a big difference in price if the quality’s the same.’ But they close their eyes to it.”
Much of the fake olive oil sold in America is imported. In 2006, in a rare intervention by authorities, federal marshals seized about 61,000 liters of what was supposedly extra virgin olive oil and 26,000 liters of olive pomace oil from a New Jersey warehouse. Some of the oil, which consisted almost entirely of soybean oil, was destined for a company called Krinos Foods. In a shifting of responsibility that recalls cases of oil fraud in Italy, Krinos blamed its supplier, DMK Global Marketing, which it says had guaranteed the quality of the oil; DMK, in turn, blamed the bottlers in Italy from whom it had purchased the oil, which according to an FDA document were Fabio Mataluni & Co. and Oleificio Fratelli Amato, both members of ASSITOL. The marshals destroyed the oil, but no criminal charges were brought against Krinos or any other companies. (This wasn’t Krinos’s first encounter with the authorities. In 1997, federal marshals seized a shipment of an olive pomace oil brand imported and distributed by Krinos, which actually consisted partially or wholly of sunflower seed oil, and in 1988 the company’s founder, John Moschalaidis, pleaded guilty in a federal court in New Jersey to conspiring to import feta cheese contaminated with benzene hexachloride, a carcinogenic pesticide.)
Large quantities of fake oil are also being mixed up on American soil, where fraudsters take advantage of the lax regulatory environment. In California, the hub for fraud is greater Los Angeles, where a number of companies are blending soy, seed oil, or cottonseed oil with low-grade olive oil and selling it as extra virgin. “There’s a river of bad oil flowing through here,” says Mustafa Altuner, a Turkish-born olive oil and specialty foods importer based in Long Beach, who has struggled for years to sell real extra virgin in the Los Angeles market. “The volume is phenomenal. Even pomace oil gets cut with soybean oil.” Michele Rubino, the olive and pomace oil producer in Puglia, thinks the problem is nationwide; he estimates that 50 percent of the oil sold in America is fraudulent, with particularly acute problems in the food service industry. “In America, pe
ople can pretty much put whatever they want in the container,” he says. Leonardo Colavita agrees. “The American [authorities] tell me, ‘So long as a product isn’t toxic, you can sell it however you like—so long as it isn’t toxic. Because if you put seed [oil] inside extra [virgin olive oil], you don’t poison anyone. So they say, ‘It’s the consumer’s choice whether to buy it or not.’” Leonardo Marseglia believes the FDA’s approach is ultimately more sensible than that of the Italian authorities. “They do more intelligent checks than us. What do they do? They check to make sure that [the oil] isn’t poisoned, that it doesn’t harm anybody’s health. But regarding the quality, the buyer has to defend himself. . . . They say, ‘If you bought yourself some extra virgin that turns out to be lampante, that’s your tough shit.’”
The FDA considers olive oil adulteration a low priority. “We’re inclined to spend our money on things where there’s a clear public health benefit,” Martin Stutsman, an FDA specialist in adulterated food, told me. Stutsman said that the FDA has no ongoing program to test olive oil quality and was unaware of any such programs in the past. Instead, the agency relies on major producers, as well as trade associations like the North American Olive Oil Association (NAOOA), the US counterpart to ASSITOL, to alert it to suspicious products. With the industry acting as a watchdog, he says, “you don’t waste your resources on surveys that are likely to make somebody comfortable but that don’t do much toward protecting the public health.”
