San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
HOW OLIVE GROWERS STRUCK OIL.
WHERE CALIFORNIA’S OLIVE OIL CRAZE IS ROOTED:
One measure of California’s vast agricultural influence is that, for certain crops, the counties in which they are grown have become brands unto themselves. Napa and Sonoma are practically synonymous with wine. Humboldt, in some circles, is shorthand for marijuana. To this list we might add Tehama County, which has played a key role in the American olive industry for more than a century. That’s an increasingly enviable position, as shifting tastes and greater nutritional awareness have led to a decadeslong rise in demand for the olive’s mellifluous byproduct: extra-virgin olive oil.
Nowhere is the evolution of the olive market more apparent than in the history of Corning’s Lucero Olive Oil, which racked up enough gold and silver medals last year to take second place overall in the current Extra Virgin Olive Oil World Ranking.
While Lucero focuses almost exclusively on its top-shelf extra-virgin olive oil today, the company was founded at a time when U.S. demand for olive oil was so low that it was barely worth producing. In fact, Lucero launched in 1947 as a producer of fermented table olives. The olive oil came later.
“Olive oil was considered a fringe industry even in 1980,” says Liz Tagami, Lucero’s general manager.
Today, extra-virgin olive oil is having an American moment. Although global production and consumption dipped slightly last year, U.S. demand for olive oil has tripled over the past three decades. Each year, California growers plant another 3,500 acres of olives — all destined to be pressed into oil.
California farmers began to experiment with olive oil production as early as the 1920s, and they enjoyed a brief flash of attention in the 1940s when World War II disrupted production in Europe. But at that time, the only Americans looking for olive oil by and large were those descended from Mediterranean countries — Greece, Italy, Spain, Tunisia — where olive oil was and is a staple.
Decades later, in the 1980s, a series of medical reports popularized the difference between “bad fats” and “good fats,” citing olive oil as a prime example of the latter. The findings contributed to an American obsession with the Mediterranean diet in the 1990s, and gave certain types of cooking oil an unexpected promotion. Oil was no longer just the lubricant easing a bite of steak down your gullet, nor merely a boiling cesspool from which French fries and doughnuts emerged. Extra-virgin olive oil was an ingredient to be savored for its own sake, and it wouldn’t even cost you a heart attack.
If you don’t see “the Mediterranean diet” in headlines today, it’s only because its principles have been absorbed into modern cuisine more generally, by way of Chez Panisse and other culinary trendsetters. “Nowadays,” Tagami says, “celebrity chefs are talking up olive oil, and you have teenagers posting their food on Instagram” — often accented with a drizzle of golden-green oil.
American olive oil consumption has tripled since 1990, but the vast majority of that oil is still imported from Europe and Africa. California-made olive oil accounts for just 6 percent of the olive oil consumed in the U.S., but that figure is rising quickly — in 2011,
“Nowadays celebrity chefs are talking up olive oil, and you have teenagers posting their food on Instagram.” Liz Tagami, general manager of Lucero Olive Oil
California claimed just 1 percent of the market. As the state poses a growing threat to legacy growers in Europe, it’s become common for trade associations affiliated with one region to cast aspersions on the purity of the other’s extra-virgin oil. These fights can lead to chemical and taste tests as sophisticated as an Olympic drug screening.
In the industry’s most infamous instance of fraud, thousands of tons of Turkish hazelnut oil were sold in 1991 as Greek olive oil. “Profits were comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks,” a European investigator once told the New Yorker. More often, bad actors are known to label lower-grade olive oil “extra virgin,” dilute extravirgin olive oil with less valuable oil, or cheaply store their oil in a way that exposes it to heat or light — which diminishes the oil’s health benefits.
Today, there are about 450 olive growers in California. While California Olive Ranch in Chico accounts for about 65 percent of the olive produced in the U.S., smaller growers such as Lucero are building the state’s brand in the olive oil world by winning awards and climbing up the global rankings.
“We are growing by a percentage point a year, and that is incredible,” Patricia Darragh, executive director of the California Olive Oil Council in Berkeley, said in a recent interview. “The demand is growing.”
I had to see for myself just what makes Lucero’s oil so good, so I held a tasting in my kitchen. Compared to the store-brand extra-virgin oil I usually keep in my pantry, Lucero’s oils are noticeably more complex, from the peachy Ascolano to the grassy, pungent Coratina. Lucero also makes a range of specialty products, such as a citrusy oil produced by milling olives and lemons together.
Indeed, a tasting is one of the best reasons to visit Lucero’s headquarters in Corning since they opened a tasting room in 2010. (A second tasting room opened in downtown Napa in 2013, but it was hit hard by the 2014 earthquake and later closed.) If you come between September and January, you might also get to witness the harvest itself. Guests have the option of a group tour, through which they will see two of Lucero’s six orchards and perhaps even some wildlife — foxes, rabbits, coyotes, turkeys, hawks and owls all live nearby.
Wine aficionados will already be familiar with much of the terminology: Olive oil is typically judged by its aroma, flavor and finish. If it’s made well, the oil will strike a balance of fruitiness, bitterness and pungency. For connoisseurs of risque humor, an oil’s mouthfeel also pairs exquisitely with jokes about extra virgins.
An oil’s qualities are most easily detected by drinking it straight from a small glass, though Tagami concedes that “few people, besides the professionals, drink olive oil very often.” There is no shame in taking your oil on bread — or, if you spring for a catered premium tasting, on a tritip steak. And olive oil, unlike wine, can’t get you drunk, so you can taste as much as you like and still make it safely back to your hotel.
If you haven’t sampled California’s olive oil, why wait? There’s no point in remaining an olive oil virgin.