The Fate of the Olive in Puglia
The Fate of the Olive in Puglia
Italy’s “Heal”
Most travelers in Puglia slow down at the sight of tables laden with food on the side of the road — onions, jars of salted capers, fennel and cauliflower under vinegar, pickled hyacinth bulbs, and countless liter bottles of golden olive oil, all in smudged, oily reused containers. “Here we make the best olive oil in all the world,” said the elderly man at this particular stand.
“What cultivar is your oil from?” I asked.
“A local one. You’ve never heard of it,” he said, insisting on pushing a free bottle of it into my hands — “just to try.”
An hour later in my hotel in Vieste, I poured his oil into a professional tasting glass, but its stench was immediate, both rancid and oxidized, reeking of oil paint from art class. But he’s still right about Puglia producing some of the best olive oil in the world.
For the next few days, I would be traveling Puglia’s 400 kilometers from top to bottom to get a sense of the state of the region’s extra virgin. Some of the trip is professional — I’ve been producing, and teaching about, extra virgin olive oil in Puglia for the last 20 years. And some of it is a little more personal. I was recently certified by La Federation Italiana Sommelier as a sommelier dell’extra vergine and would like to see whether the new training helps me understand Puglia better as the region that is the largest producer of olive oil in Italy.
Vincenzo Lo Bascio, standing before the town of Minervino Murge. Silvestro Silvestori.
“What Northern Europe calls ‘extra virgin’ isn’t even made from olives,” said Vicenzo Lo Bascio, owner of Terradiva. He was standing at the base of the hill town of Minervino Murge, the charming but least visited of Puglia’s “white cities.” It was while living in Germany and England that he had decided to move the family farm, in Puglia, away from wine and almonds to making extra virgin from the local olive variety, Coratina. “It wasn’t until I really started traveling around Italy that I realized how special la Coratina is. She really is the queen of oil olives.”
It’s an expression you often hear in Puglia, the singling out of Coratina as something special. While it does have higher yields and its own unmistakable flavor, what makes it stand out even among other high-quality extravirgin oil is its freakishly high polyphenols.
Those preservative properties — the polyphenols, which function as antioxidants — are routinely measured at twice the level that experts say an extra virgin needs to be considered a pharmaceutical. Even the US Food and Drug Administration says olive oil “may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease,” although it doesn’t point to polyphenols. Most Pugliese producers sooner or later mention their morning habit of taking a shot of extra virgin on an empty stomach as a health tonic. The one they choose is always Coratina, even if they produce other cultivars.
While no one disputes Coratina’s place on the throne, many outside of Italy find the taste too assertively bitter, part of the family of bitter vegetable flavors that often divides Italians from non-Italians. Piggybacking on that bitterness is a black-pepper burn in the back of the throat, which is often criticized by those used to supermarket oils. Those oils famously lack the three-legged stool of taste components of high-quality extra virgin: fruit, pepper, and bitterness. And as commodity oils, their expiration dates often flirt with fiction, reflecting 18 months after the oil was refined using hexane and then deodorized, rather than being based on any actual harvest date. The expiration date is often based on the bottling date, and bottling waits until the commodity price is high. Well-made, well-kept true extra virgin doesn’t truly expire so much as just mellow over time.
“My wife is German,” Lo Bascio said, “and the bitterness was one of the biggest hurdles for her, initially, when she moved here.” He adds, in a parental tone that she likely didn’t appreciate: “Bad oil burns your lips. Good oil burns your throat.” But her palate eventually changed, and now she’s the one who delights in pouring the oils at all the olive oil festivals in Teutonic Europe, even encouraging the visitors to skip the bread cubes and taste directly from a tasting cup, something that provokes tears and a series of coughs, even among the most seasoned professionals.
Lo Bascio’s Coratina contains less than 0.2 percent free oleic acid (an “extra virgin” becomes merely “virgin” when it rises above 0.8), and the oil’s polyphenols push 900 milligrams per liter (an oil becomes “medicinal” at 400).
I poured a little of his Coratina into a cobalt-blue tasting glass — even professional tasters hide the color of an olive oil from their own eyes, as it has no bearing on quality and it’s the easiest element to fake — and sucked air into the corners of my mouth, aerating the oil to amplify its flavor and any potential defects. The sensation of artichoke was immediate, followed by dill, black pepper, and freshly mowed lawn.
At meals, Coratina’s assertive flavors play best with other big flavors, such as of legumes, grilled meats, and Puglia’s heartier, more famous vegetables, such as chicory and broccoli raab. The oil itself tastes like hearty Italian vegetables, as if you were able to distill a salad of wild arugula cut with radicchio and chicory, with all of its green nature arriving intact.
The next morning, two hours south and just outside Giovinazzo, I was in a massive stone masseria, talking with Enzo Scivetti, who has recently branched out from being one of Puglia’s most respected wine educators to being a producer of high-quality extra virgin.
Enzo Scivetti, olive producer in Giovinazzo, Puglia. Silvestro Silvestori
“We’re very diligent about harvesting earlier in the season and getting the olives very quickly to the mill,” he says. “And of course, keeping everything below 26 degrees C.” That’s what some consumers still call “cold pressing.” Above 26 (79 degrees F), you have a far higher yield, including the least desirable part of oil.
He has launched his own brand, Di Sole e di Azzurro, specializing in the varieties Coratina and Cima di Bitonto, which in this part of Puglia is confusingly referred to as Ogliarola. (Puglia has altogether four cultivars of olive called Ogliarola, literally, “the olive that gives oil.”) Fully grasping firsthand the role that value-adding has in the world of high-end wine, Scivetti takes a lot of costly extra steps, such as milling his olives in a closed, oxygen-free system, which is the state of the art for limiting oxidation in an oil’s early stages.
But he hasn’t been able to produce the oil fast enough, giving it an unintended cult status. Like many high-quality producers, he sells his oil exclusively outside of Puglia, knowing well that those that still make oil at home (most people in Puglia have someone in their extended families who still makes it) would never spend money on anyone else’s oil regardless of the awards it won.
This double culture of olive oil is Puglia’s blessing and its curse. People consume their own family’s oil, and they confuse the virtue of the person who produces it with the quality of the oil itself.
The technological advances with olive oil — in washing, pressing, separating, centrifuging — surpass what the average home producer can do out in the garage, where the methods are still those of well over a hundred years ago. Many in Puglia don’t seem to know this. Or they don’t care. Or what’s most important is cultural identity: “We are the people who make olive oil.”
Scivetti’s Cima di Bitonto leans toward almond flavors and has far less bitterness than his Coratina, suggesting the two oils are adept at two different uses. In general, oils that overpromise with their fragrance but underdeliver in flavor are preferred for dressing fish, because with hot fish the fragrance becomes volatile, while the flavor remains not too assertive and doesn’t cover up the delicate flavor of the fish.
Cima di Bitonto rivals the variety Peranzana as Puglia’s great fish condiment oil. It won’t surprise any consumer of Provençal extra virgin that the Peranzana actually came from France. (Several cities in northern Puglia still speak a form of ancient French, impressive when you consider the distance from France: peranzana is a corruption of “Provençal.”)
Scivetti had set up a stone table in the middle of the otherwise-empty fortress-thick masseria, topped with both blue tasting glasses and crusty artisanal bread. As I poured a little of his Cima di Bitonto into a tasting glass, mixed Mediterranean herbs floated up into my nostrils along with promises of green almonds and just enough black pepper burn to make you forget the grinder.
“We broke the 1,000 milligram medicinal mark the first year of production,” he said, still feeling pleasantly surprised. “Next year we’re doubling production: I’ll put aside a few bottles for you.”
The next day, about two hours south of Giovinazzo, I saw the first flashes of brown outside the car window. Twenty minutes later it’s only brown — wooden cadavers — as far as you can see east and west. Traveling along the highway just above the speed limit, it would be like this for hours now.
Olive trees are evergreen, except when they die. Then the color turns khaki to cinnamon. Puglia now has enough dead trees to be visible from outer space. The official number is 10 million, but if you look at the area infected, it’s likely that it will climb eventually to 21 million, or a third of all the trees in Puglia.
Flavio Massari / Alamy Stock Photo
Through some remarkable genetic sleuthing, we now know that in 2008 a spittlebug, Xylella fastidiosa, came from Costa Rica, introducing in its saliva the lethal bacteria. When the bug feeds on the leaves, the bacteria enter the tree lymph system through the bug’s saliva, and eventually begin to choke the tree’s ability to drink, causing a slow death, agonizing to witness.
If that weren’t demoralizing enough, the olive trees then want to become bushes; the suckers that grow out of the trunk remain vibrant green, giving the viewer the hope that perhaps this one tree will recover.
It won’t.
The effect of Xylella fastidiosa, called Olive Quick Decline Syndrome. Silvestro Silvestori.
Olive Quick Decline Syndrome, commonly called Xylella, has been a perfect storm. When the former premier of Italy took trees from Puglia to line his driveway near Milan, the outcry against cultural appropriation was enough that laws were passed making it illegal to move old trees. Global olive oil fraud remains so rampant that many farmers had stopped picking their olives, preferring to work for others doing something else. They stopped cutting the grass around the base of the trees, leaving the spittlebug its preferred mating habitat. The fat, notoriously inefficient Italian government did nothing. Conspiracy theories exploded, and theorists honed the same skills that were later used to malign Covid vaccines. And driving all of it was provincialism, so that for many people the answer was to maintain the two heirloom cultivars, no matter that neither one was resistant and millions of the trees were dying in plain sight.
While the road forward is still not completely clear, there are a few working tactics.
Demetrio De Magistris, olive producer near Galatina, Puglia. Silvestro Silvestori
“Twenty-three years ago, I was looking for a science-based solution for how to harvest mechanically in the profound absence of a willing workforce. While there were many olive growers growing the traditional Ogliarola and Cellina di Nardò, very, very few of them were able to do so profitably. They would pick for a consortium that would sell to a large multinational that would use their oil to cut the seed oils that are sold as extra virgin in supermarkets all over the world.
“It turns out that FS-17 is resistant, and many producers are now ripping out the dead trees and replanting with the olive, which often goes by a wishful nickname, la favolosa” — the fabulous one.
Those who are embracing the new cultivar are still three or four years away from having yields large enough to be profitable. The older the sapling, the sooner to market, but also the more expensive, multiplied by tens of thousands — after years of little or no income. Each year De Magistris himself has been adding tens of thousands of one- and two-year-old saplings.
As a grower, he understands plants. People are something different. The provincialism is hard to watch.
“FS-17 has higher yields, can be mechanically harvested, the polyphenols are higher, and even the tree’s structure resists damage from the mechanical harvest,” De Magistris says, referring to FS-17’s having a Christmas tree shape rather than the more classic martini glass. “FS-17 is a remarkable olive in every way. Yet many don’t want anything to do with it, neither producers nor consumers.
“It’s going to take longer than my lifetime to replant 10 million trees. We have two olive oil cultures here in Puglia. We have one of what your grandfather makes out in the garage. And we have one of the highest-quality extra virgins in the world. If we are smart, we can use this disease as our rebirth, doing away with one culture and working hard to really develop the other.”
It’s an idea, I found, that unites sommeliers of extra virgin and producers of high-quality olive oil, unexpectedly pitting us against what happens in oily garages and dusty work sheds up and down the peninsula. Everyone I spoke with is madly, madly in love with Puglia: it’s just that some of us are trying to recover the past and others are straining to develop the future. ●
From issue 110The post The Fate of the Olive in Puglia appeared first on The Art of Eating Magazine.