Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil
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As we watched, Saverio analyzed the scene in wages, weights, and yields, showing a number-sense I’ve since seen in many oil-makers. One skilled olive-picker, who earns €100 a day, can harvest about six big trees, he said. Each tree produces between forty and fifty kilos of olives per harvest, which in turn yields about 15 percent by weight in oil—6 to 7.5 kilos per tree, or 6.6 to 8.2 liters of oil (one liter of oil weighs 0.91 kilos). So just to harvest this tenuta of ancient trees costs up to €2.50 per liter bottle of oil. Then there’s the expense of milling the olives and bottling, marketing, and shipping the oil, as well as of caring for the trees throughout the year—pruning, fertilizing, irrigation, pest control. Add in taxes, permits, and chemical exams required by various government agencies that test oil quality, and each bottle of oil ends up costing the De Carlo family about €6 to produce.
Admittedly, he said, costs are lower in their younger groves, where the trees are short and neatly spaced with no foreign vegetation in the way, and each worker can harvest four times as many olives. They’d be lower still if the trees were planted in tight four-by-twelve foot grids and came to a point like Christmas trees, as they are in the so-called super-high-density groves of Spain, Portugal, and California, where the olives of a few specialized cultivars are picked with over-the-top harvesters like those used in the wine industry, and the trees are heavily fertilized and irrigated. Yet, given the high price of land, labor, and materials in Italy, even with the highest level of automation it’s expensive to make extra virgin olive oil on Italian soil. And according to many experts, including the De Carlos, mechanizing the process beyond a certain point reduces oil quality. “What would happen to the complex aromas and flavors of our oils,” Saverio asks, “if we made them with disposable trees, in an olive grove run like a factory?” Old trees aren’t simply agricultural idealism. For the De Carlos, making great oil requires hard work, determination, and a sharp number-sense, but also a dose of poetry.
Light filtered through the canopy of the carob tree over our heads. In the grove beyond, in the surreally bright sun of the Italian deep south, men on ladders leaned against the giant olive trees, hollowed by the seasons and twisting in the slow dance of growth and gravity. This scene of beauty and fecundity had been reenacted here every year down through the centuries, as the heavy pull of these trees shaped the lives of generation after generation. Seeing all this, I knew, would enhance the De Carlo oil when I tasted it, adding the richness of this place and its past to the perceptible tastes of the oil.
Flavio Zaramella had told me of fleets of eighteen-wheelers filled with olives from Puglia being unloaded in the night in mills throughout the north. I asked if the De Carlos knew any local growers who sold their olives like this. Grazia nodded. “Sure. Every year at the beginning of the harvest, the trucks park in front of the mills, load up with coratina olives, and head north to Tuscany, Umbria, Liguria.” She grinned, her teeth white and even in her tanned face. “You know, those famous oil-making regions, where they grow so few olives.”
FIVE YEARS AGO, in a grove of ancient olive trees in southwest Cyprus, archaeologists discovered the scene of a catastrophe. A large workshop had been destroyed by a powerful earthquake about 1850 BC and, as at Pompeii, time had stopped. Excavators found every object just as the terror-stricken workers had left it: distilling equipment and maceration dishes containing essences of lavender, coriander, laurel, and rosemary; smelting furnaces that still held traces of copper ore and bronze of the kind used to make statuettes; and looms for weaving linen and wool fabrics. At the center of the complex, they unearthed grindstones and a massive press for making olive oil, along with twelve enormous pithoi capable of holding a total of 3,000 liters of oil.
The significance of the mill at the heart of this seemingly haphazard agglomeration of industries gradually dawned on the excavators. Olive oil, they saw, was the common denominator for the entire complex: it was the solvent and base for perfume-making, the hot-burning fuel for the smelting furnaces, the fabric softener and lubricant for the looms in the textile mill. Workers in the mill also decanted olive oil into terra-cotta urns and sold it to local people, who would have used it as food, skin lotion, medicine, and lamp fuel. Worshippers in a triangular temple on the site even offered sacrifices of oil on a high stone altar to a mysterious god embodied as the skull of a bull with curving stone horns. “Olive oil was the greatest renewable energy source in antiquity, which burned as hot as benzene, and had twice the caloric content of carbon,” says Maria Rosaria Belgiorno, lead archaeologist for the project. “At Pyrgos we find it playing a central role in a number of industries, including three—perfumes, textiles, and metallurgy—which were the central pillars of the Cypriot economy, and the main goods for long-distance trade via shipping routes and caravans. No wonder olive oil was considered sacred from the earliest times, together with the tree that produced it.” Four thousand years ago, olive oil was already a driving force in the Mediterranean world: for machines, people, and the imagination.
The olive tree, Olea Europea L. sativa, is the domesticated cousin of the wild oleaster, Olea Europea L. oleaster, a hardy evergreen shrub with thorns and narrow, lanceolate leaves that is native to the Mediterranean basin and much of the Middle East. Olives are a member of the Oleaceae family, which contains some nine hundred species of trees, shrubs, and woody climbers distributed throughout the world, primarily in forested regions. Some members of the family, such as jasmines and lilacs, are famous for their flowers, while others, such as the ashes, are known for their fine-grained hardwood. Osmanthus fragrans, the tea olive, has sweet-smelling petals that are much prized in Japan and China as flavorings for tea, but only the olive tree produces economically important fruit.
The oleaster is extremely hardy, and thrives even in hot, near-drought conditions, producing generous vegetative wood each year as well as numerous suckers, or green shoots, that sprout from its root ball and, if not pruned back, rapidly create a dense growth at the foot of the tree. Its olives are drupes, or stone fruit, like cherries, peaches, and plums; the olive flesh contains mesocarp cells which produce tiny droplets of oil. The end product of photosynthesis, olive oil is a highly efficient energy storage medium for arid climates. The oil nourishes the olive seedling when it germinates from the stone, and helps to regulate the seedling’s growth and development. As soon as an olive is separated from the mother tree, in fact, enzymes are released inside it which rapidly break the oil down into a kind of watery, microorganism-rich compost around the seed, an ideal microenvironment in which to germinate a seed in the desert.
Still, the olive’s bounty remains something of a puzzle. An olive tree produces far more oil than its seeds appear to require, and the vast majority of oil contained in an olive is lost long before its seed germinates. Some biologists suggest that oil may aid in plant distribution, by making the fruit more appetizing with a dash of sweet, rich oil. A number of animal and bird species consume olive seeds together with the fruit and deposit them in their droppings, thus sowing olive seeds far and wide in rich dabs of manure. The dove of biblical fame is one species. Another is man.
Hints of the first human uses of the oleaster are scattered throughout the archaeological strata of the Paleolithic and Neolithic across the Mediterranean. From Spain and the French Riviera to North Africa, the Greek islands, and Israel, archaeologists have discovered heaps of oleaster pits which suggest they were being collected. Mysterious 7,000-year-old petroglyphs in the barren Ahaggar Mountains, deep in the Sahara, show dancing men with crowns of olive leaves, showing the importance of olives at a time when a milder climate permitted them to grow there. People gathered wild olives for food, and at some point began to press them for oil. Or perhaps the reverse: some scholars, noting the extreme bitterness of uncured olives, suggest that people first made oil for use as a skin lotion, and only later started eating it. The earliest known apparatus for extracting oil from wild olives was a stone grinder, similar to a mortar and pestle, which made a pul
p that was subsequently placed in a stone basin and pressed for oil under a flat rock. Other early oil-makers may have obtained oil by putting pulped olives in a cloth bag and wringing it.
The oleaster was probably first domesticated in Palestine in the fourth millennium BC. By selecting and grafting oleasters with the best fruit, growth characteristics, and hardiness, and by pruning back excess green wood to concentrate their vegetative energies on fruit production, early farmers gradually turned the bush into a tree which bore larger, fleshier olives that contained more oil. But inside every domestic tree lurks a wild olive, which reasserts itself if the tree is abandoned: suckers sprout in a dense underbrush, the central trunk withers, and the tree reverts to the bush-like primordial olive.
By the late Bronze Age, olive trees were being cultivated systematically in the eastern Mediterranean, and oil was being extracted from their fruit with large presses, sometimes operated by several people at once. At Ekron in Palestine, a 2,800-year-old olive mill was found, with a battery of one hundred massive presses which used logs for lever arms and were capable of producing about 500,000 liters a year. In the third millennium BC, earnings from the sale of olive oil were already the lifeblood of several Mediterranean economies. Olive oil was an important part of the king’s treasury in Ebla, Mari, Ugarit, and Minoan Crete, where it was stored in huge quantities in earthenware jars in the royal cellars. Cuneiform tablets at Ebla and Mycenaean Greek Linear B writings on Crete describe broad olive plantations, large-scale mills, and an extensive trade in oil with peoples throughout the Mediterranean. Olive oil helped not only to fund the rise of these civilizations but to preserve their histories as well: during the invasions or natural disasters that brought each culture to an abrupt end, the highly flammable oil stocks beneath the royal palaces caught fire, and baked the clay tablets stored in nearby archives as if in an enormous kiln, preserving them for discovery thousands of years later.
As the size and sophistication of the Pyrgos factory suggests, olive-oil-based perfumes were already a major industry in Cyprus by 1850 BC, which the island exported throughout the Mediterranean. Perhaps because of the miraculous way that perfumes capture the ephemeral scents of spring flowers and aromatic herbs, or because of the mild euphoria they can produce, the first mentions of oil-based perfumes occur in religious contexts such as sacrifices and burials. Already in 3500 BC, at Abydos in Upper Egypt, jars of scented oils and unguents appear in a predynastic tomb. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, composed starting around three thousand years ago, perfumes and oils appear as metaphors for civilization. By the third millennium BC, perfumes were so widely used in the Near East that specific styles of perfume-holder, made in alabaster and later known in Greek as aryballoi, were mass-produced, and are frequently found by archaeologists. Perfumes had other, less hallowed uses as well. Since their base was an edible oil, perfumes were added to foods and drunk in wine, either to enhance their flavors or to mask their pong. They were used in massage and beautification, and some were considered aphrodisiacs. After all, Aphrodite, goddess of love and desire, was thought to be the inventor of perfumes; myths said she rose from the sea near Cyprus, an island known for millennia as the center of perfume production.
The Cretans also exported large quantities of oil to Egypt, where it was used to make unguents and cosmetics as well as to embalm mummies. By the Middle Kingdom, the Egyptians were producing their own oil, olive trees had become an important motif in Egyptian art, and amphorae of oil were a common grave good (the tomb of Tutankhamen was amply supplied). For the Egyptians, the clear, strong light of burning oil had sacred resonance. In a papyrus from about 1000 BC, the pharaoh Ramses II expresses his devotion to the sun god Ra: “I made olive groves in your city of Heliopolis, supplied with gardeners and numerous workers charged with extracting pure Egyptian oil of the first quality, to keep alive the lamps in your sumptuous holy palace.” In this life and the next, olive oil was a sacred substance.
FOR THE DE CARLO family olives mean home, not only because their family tree has intertwined with their groves and with oil-making for the last four centuries, but literally as well: their house is perched atop their mill like the keep of a castle. The impression of defensiveness at casa De Carlo is accentuated by the imposing security wall which rings the property, as well as the surveillance cameras which film everyone who approaches the main gate and project them on screens inside the house. Local producers are periodically held up by armed oil bandits, who drive tanker trucks with high-pressure pumps to siphon oil out of storage silos. “After a certain hour we don’t open the gates,” Saverio said as we returned to the house for lunch, after touring the De Carlo groves. Francesco and Marina were waiting for us beside a large olive-wood fire, Francesco resting his head in his sister’s lap as they ate pickled cima di Mola olives from a small porcelain bowl and tossed the pits onto the coals. (Olive pits are an excellent fuel, and oil-makers often sell their olive pomace—the solid residue from oil extraction, consisting mostly of crushed pits—to electric companies and other industries, to be burned in furnaces.)
Grazia knelt on the hearth beside them, and set several pounds of suckling lamb on a grill over the coals to cook. While the meat sizzled and popped and we watched the little eruptions of flame from each drip of fat, she told a true story of poisoning, blindness, and death, and said she half wished it would happen again.
In March 1986, she said, hospitals in northwest Italy began to admit dozens of people suffering from acute nausea, lack of coordination, fainting spells, and blurred vision. Twenty-six died, and twenty more went blind. Investigators eventually discovered that each victim had recently drunk a local white wine; several producers, they found, had been raising the alcohol levels of their wines by cutting them with methanol, a highly toxic substance also called wood alcohol. The scandal, and the resulting government crackdown, devastated the Italian wine industry. Consumption plummeted, and hundreds of producers, most of them honest, went bankrupt. Ultimately, however, the crisis radically improved Italian wine-making, and forced a generalized shift from quantity to quality.
“Before the methanol scandal, people around here didn’t make wine like this,” Grazia said, pouring glasses of Rivera Il Falcone 2004, a garnet-red wine made from a local grape varietal, nero di Troia, by a producer at Castel del Monte, a nearby medieval castle. “And even if they had, nobody would have bought it. Most people just bought their wine in big jugs without labels. You’d see them on tables in restaurants, where they’d been sitting open for days. Most people wouldn’t dream of buying a bottle of wine with a label on it.”
After the methanol crisis, consumers grew more particular, and the producers who survived the market consolidation learned to use techniques and technology pioneered by French enologists. “After the scandal, producers started creating brand names they were proud of and wanted to defend. Only after methanol did people start thinking about what they were buying and drinking, and become willing to pay for the good stuff. And only after methanol did the government get really serious about checking quality, and making sure that the bottle contained just what the label said.” During the 1990s, dozens of premier Italian wines emerged and wine became a major export product (wine recently topped $1 billion in annual sales in Italy).
Grazia brought the wine to her lips, then stopped and put it down without tasting it. “In olive oil, we’re where the wine-makers were before methanol,” she said. “We’re stuck in the dark ages.” She shook her head disconsolately. “It would be awful to see my children’s livelihood damaged, even destroyed. And I’d certainly never want to see anyone hurt. But sometimes I wish there could be a methanol scandal in olive oil, which would obliterate this corrupt industry completely, and rebuild it in a healthy way. It’s been Babylon around here for far too long.”
Our lunch began with a succession of seasonal vegetables, mostly from the De Carlos’ own garden: lampascioni, a small wild hyacinth bulb marinated in oil and vinegar; meaty, densely-flavored cherry tomatoes; punta
relle, the tender tips of a local chicory; and flat little artichokes as big around as a pound coin or a quarter, lightly fried. “Pugliesi eat an incredible amount of vegetables—we’re like goats,” said Francesco, a rangy twenty-four-year-old with a crew cut and large, dark, serious eyes that watch you unblinkingly, though their intensity is softened by a faint, unsarcastic smile that never leaves his lips. He holds a degree in food quality and a diploma in olive oil tasting from the University of Naples, and recently launched a De Carlo line of vegetables in extra virgin olive oil: mushrooms, artichokes, peppers, and other produce grown on their lands, as well as green table olives of the picholine and cima di Mola cultivars. “I introduced them to broaden our product offering so that our facilities would remain active throughout the year,” he explained. “But given the sorry state of oil prices nowadays, they’re a much higher-margin business and help us stay profitable.” His modern financial jargon was so different from his father’s homespun way of talking about the oil business that I instinctively asked if he and Saverio worked well together.