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OLIVES AND OLIVE OIL

A WELL-OILED ESSAY
This essay was originally published
in Living France magazine

More than 100 varieties of olive trees are cultivated in France. They are endemic to the
south of France and even often specific to a particular soil.
Since antiquity, the olive producer has played a very important role in the life of the Mediterranean
populations, who think of them as sacred trees. The oil produced from the olives in the Nice area, the
variety is caillettier has long been put to many uses: cooking, of course, but also for lighting, washing
and heating. The Greeks used the olive as a form of currency, and claim to have had the first olive tree
saying that it was given to the Goddess Athena and grown on the Acropolis. To destroy a mans olive
trees, they said, was an act of war.

Bound for the French Riviera to investigate the mysteries of olive oil production, I was expecting to find
olive oil in a number of guises, but I didnt think Id find it in ice cream. The Restaurant Issautier in Saint

Martin du Var has a couple of Michelin stars, so you do rather come to anticipate something a little out of
the ordinary. But, ice cream flavoured with olive oil?

Then again, when, a few days later, I visited the Restaurant lOliviera in Nice, it was with some surprise
that I was served tiramisu drizzled with olive oil well, it would have been a surprise, but by then I was
taking it all in my stride. In the south of France, olive oil gets in on virtually every culinary act, or so it
seems.

Many of the olive producers in Provence and Languedoc were wiped out by the severe frost in 1956, after
which they switched to producing wine. This was a major turning point in French oliculture. But in recent
times, the production of olives and olive oil is back in vogue. The twenty-fifth of November, the Feast of
Sainte Catherine Labour, is officially the first day on which olives can be harvested, though in practice
the seasons and the ripeness of the drupes (olives still on the tree) have rather more of a say in the
matter. And gathering olives (La cueillette des olives) may well go on well into the following year,
sometimes as late as March.

No-one seems quite sure how many varieties of olive tree there are. So numerous are the varieties of
olive tree that there are fifteen species growing on the Riviera alone that cannot be identified, and which
have survived since before 1956. They flourish all along the Mediterranean coast from Menton in the east
all the way round to Perpignan in the Pyrnes-Orientales. In the Drome its the tanche, in Hrault and
Aude, the picholine or the much-prized lucques (the so-called Rolls Royce of olives), a rare variety of
olive grown in the region around Carcassonne. As well as being unusual, the lucques is also difficult to
harvest by machine, making it extremely labour intensive. This unique olive has a light, nutty taste,
crescent shape and bright green colour.

At the Palais des Olives in Grasse, a town better renowned for its perfume production, I joined a group of
oil tasters, lined up like recalcitrant children with tiny spoons onto which Monsieur Butty dribbled small
quantities of his precious oil, each tasting accompanied by an enthusiastic monologue, which left me with
the impression that he had personally gathered every single olive, and probably had individual names for
every one of them. As a child, I was spooned cod liver oil in much the same way, but there was nothing
fishy about the samples in Grasse. The variety Negrette has a nutty taste, and leaves a light but very
distinct peppery taste in the throat; Verdale has the scent of green apples and bananas, even artichokes,
while the oil sold as Castelas is a blend of Verdale, Grossane, Picholine and Salonenque, and has a hint
of cocoa and artichoke an odd complexity, perhaps, but very flavoursome.

The olive oils described as 'Virgin' conjure up images of all manner of lush richness and purity. In fact,
virgin olive oils offer a wide variety of tastes, depending on the type of the fruit, and the degree of
bitterness and pungency. Extra Virgin Olive Oil has to be of exceptional purity, with a flawless taste and a
level of acidity no higher than 1%; Virgin Olive Oil must also be flawless on the palate, but here the level
of acidity must not exceed 2%. Naively, I suppose, I used to be beguiled by the labelling of olive oils as
'First Pressing'. But at the Restaurant l'Oliviera, Nadim Beyrouti explained that 'First Pressing' should be
ignored simply because all subsequent pressings are now illegal in France.

'You should never cook with olive oil', he admonishes, 'because all the quality and perfume simply goes
up the chimney. Use sunflower oil for cooking', he advises as he drizzles oils onto my salad, into my soup,
onto the lamb and over that sumptuous tiramisu. I half expected him to drizzle some into my wine, but,
thankfully, he didn't.

Gathering the olives is a tiring business; it begins as a bit of fun, but the humorous side of things soon
pales. Producers drape nets around the base of the trees, and then give them a good shaking. Others
use bamboo poles to thrash the branches of the trees, though these days there are more modern, less
aesthetically pleasing, instruments of olive gathering. I found picking them by hand to be remarkably
therapeutic, but inevitably there's a limit to how far I can reach up a tree without a precariously balanced
ladder. And then there's the laborious, back-breaking session of picking up the nets, weeding out stray
leaves and bits of branches, looking for any drupes that may be withered and past their best, because
you can be sure the people at the mill will spot them, and too many poor quality olives could get your
whole consignment rejected.

In Opio, I visited just such a mill, the Brague Mill, a bustling enterprise where olive oil is produced using
both ancient and modern techniques. At the entrance a group of men were stacking sacks of green-black
caillettier olives onto a palette to be weighed when one of the sacks spilled some of its contents. The
ensuing maul to recover the bounty would have done the French rugby team proud: not one olive was
overlooked with minimum quantities in the region of 150kg of olives required to justify a dedicated
pressing rather than a co-operative one, every olive had to pull its weight.

A few moments later, a less ambitious father and son team turned up hand-in-hand, pulling a toboggan
full of olives; then a young couple, arms around each other as they carried a Casino supermarket bag that
probably contained fewer than three kilos of the fruit. Quantity didnt matter. Three or four kilos of olives
would get you a little over a litre of olive oil, and there must be something very satisfying about having on
the kitchen shelf a bottle of your very own olive oil.

Producers of much larger quantities can even after a good deal of administrative paperwork and
bureaucratic wrangling have their oil approved as an AOC olive oil, the much-coveted Appellation
Origine Controle over which actress Carol Drinkwater and her husband wrangled for many long years. In
fact, anyone fancying the idea of moving to the south of France to produce olive oil will find The Olive
Farm, The Olive Season and The Olive Harvest contain a huge amount of useful information.

As for me, I'll never look at a bottle of olive oil in quite the same way, ever again