News About Olive Oil

New York Times: On the Olive Oil Trail, Glass by Glass
May 19, 2006 -- On the Olive Oil Trail, Glass by Glass
By WENDY KNIGHT
"YOU need to warm the glass in your hand first," said Ted Hall, the proprietor of Long Meadow Ranch, a 650-acre property in the Mayacamas Mountains high above the Napa Valley in northern California.
Mr. Hall was standing in the ranch's wine cave, a rammed-earth structure that smelled of earth, damp and pure, with a hint of spilled wine. An original Andy Warhol cow print was hanging in the foyer. On the wood bar, Mr. Hall displayed two wine bottles, proper glasses and a tray of cheese.
But this was not the usual event in California's wine country. There's a new addition to today's wine tasting — extra-virgin olive oil. And not just at the Long Meadow Ranch.
As olive oil is becoming more widely used by Americans, the number of olive-oil producers has risen, as has the interest in touring and tasting. A handful of properties in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys north of San Francisco have begun to offer olive-grove tours and olive-oil tastings as alternatives to winery hopping. Some of the tastings are for both wine and olive oil; others focus exclusively on the fruit of the olive tree.
Mr. Hall said that extra-virgin olive oil is evaluated in three steps — with the nose, palate and throat. The characteristics of the oil depend, among other factors, on the varietals used and the ripeness of the olives when harvested. For example, Italian olives, when picked green, tend to be peppery, while Spanish varietals are more mellow in taste.
Olive-oil tastings are as precise as those for wine. Mr. Hall said he senses "freshly mowed grass," "the husk of a walnut" and "a little bit of apple" in his estate's 2004 Spanish varietals.
To sample properly, the oil is taken into the mouth with more of a suck from the sides of the mouth — producing a slurping sound — than a refined sip from the lips. Once it is inside the mouth, the oil is swished across the tongue, and the taster lets it settle into the pocket between the cheek and the gum before swallowing. About 10 seconds after it hits the throat, there's an urge to cough, a testament to the oil's piquancy.
When a recent group let loose with the coughs, Mr. Hall laughed. "We call that a two-cough olive," he said. "That's good."
The tourist season in Napa and Sonoma runs from May through September. Olives are picked November through January, but most places aren't open to the public during the busy harvesting period. The ideal time to visit olive groves is May and June, when the olive oil from the fall harvest is released.
To get to the town of Napa, you drive north from Oakland up Highway 80 past a seemingly endless string of shopping complexes and onto Route 29, entering Napa from the south. Ducking off the main road into Napa's business district reveals the town's agriculture and mining history in buildings like the Historic Napa Mill along the Napa River (now home to a historic hotel and several retail shops) and Copia, the American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts, an educational center that celebrates the region's agricultural bounty with demonstration gardens and multimedia presentations.
The real beauty of the region unfolds a few miles north of Napa in the town of Yountville — with its classically restored brick and clapboard buildings and stellar restaurants — and in the Rutherford Appellation, a fertile valley framed by springtime jade green mountains that turn progressively tawny with summer's heat.
Long Meadow Ranch is in the Rutherford Appellation on Route 29, one of two north-south routes winding through the valley. Tours of the ranch begin at the Rutherford Gardens, the estate's vegetable gardens. A Pinzgauer, a Swiss Army troop carrier, transports guests a few miles north to the entrance of the estate. The "integrated organic farming system" grows heirloom vegetables, grapes for wine, grass for the ranch's Scottish longhorn and shorthorn cattle, and Italian and Spanish olives.
AS olives mature, they turn from green to red to black. Olives harvested early, when they're green, produce pungent, peppery oil. Late-harvested olives are more subtle.
"Harvesting is an artistic decision," Mr. Hall said. "We harvest olives when they're 75 percent black, 25 percent red or green," creating a delicate oil. Indeed, Long Meadow's Prato Lungo olive oil felt like a piece of fine silk floating inside the mouth.
Another vineyard that features tastings and tours of its olive-oil process is Round Pond, on Rutherford Crossroads, a stately road that connects Route 29 to the Silverado Trail, the less-traveled north-south route in the Napa Valley. Olive trees line the driveway to the olive mill. A pair of live oak trees and two dozen agave plants loosely define a patio where lunches are served. Twelve acres of olive trees are planted in flat fields bordering the mill to the north and west along the Napa River. Across the driveway from the one-story, glass and steel building are naked grape vines and sun-yellow mustard plants, used as ground cover for the vineyards.
Round Pond makes wines, vinegars and olive oils, including the award-winning blood orange and Meyer lemon oils made with organic citrus fruit and Italian and Spanish olives grown on the 400-acre property. The fruit is hand harvested from November to January — the Italian varietals when they are green and the Spanish olives when they are black. With baskets secured around their torsos, the pickers strip the branches, gently pulling the olives into the baskets.
"The fruit is delicate," said the tour manager, Jill Jackson, a petite woman with the sun-blushed, wiry appearance of a farmhand. "If it's mishandled it produces a chemical reaction that makes the oil less flavorful."
Turning olives into oil at Round Pond is a mix of Old World charm and high-tech efficiency. With its gleaming stainless steel equipment, the impeccably clean olive mill resembles an industrial kitchen and smells of citrus. The state-of-the-art equipment — including the stone press, a machine with two massive Italian granite wheels riding atop a four-ton granite wheel — is made by Pieralisi, an Italian company that has been manufacturing such equipment since 1860. Three years ago, Round Mill hired an Italian mill master, who, according to Ms. Jackson, was able to translate the operating instructions, which were written in Italian.
Within four hours of the picking, a forklift empties the olives into a stainless steel bin. The fruit rides up a conveyor belt into a vacuum chute that removes the stems and leaves. The olives are then deposited into a tray and washed. Where they go next depends on which varietals are being processed. Late-harvested Spanish olives are fed directly into the stone press. Three stainless steel blades and a scrapper continuously push the olives under the rotating wheels, crushing the olives. Early-harvested Italian olives are chopped and pressed in the hammer mill.
Olive paste from the mills is pushed into a type of kneader, where it is processed and pumped into a horizontal and then a vertical centrifuge, where the water is finally separated from the oil. The oil is stored in stainless steel tanks under nitrogen until it is blended and bottled. The total processing time takes an astonishingly quick two hours, producing an exceptionally fresh product.
"Most people have never tasted olive oil the way we do here," said Ryan McConnell, a former Goldman Sachs analyst and a second-generation owner of the property.
At the McEvoy Ranch near Petaluma, there is an opportunity to see a private estate as well as taste the olive oil. The ranch is the country home of the San Francisco philanthropist Nan McEvoy, who is credited with initiating the modern commercial olive oil industry in California.
Only after buying the 550-acre property two decades ago did Mrs. McEvoy discover that it was strictly zoned for agriculture. So she imported and planted 3,000 Tuscan olive trees. Today, the property's 18,000 trees produce 24,000 liters of extra-virgin olive oil, making it one of the country's largest producers of organic estate olive oil.
From Napa, the McEvoy Ranch is reached by driving west on Routes 121 and 12 to Sonoma. You'll pass through the Carneros district, where fields of vineyards have supplanted the cattle and sheep that once grazed on this flat, elevated land.
In the town of Sonoma, Highway 116 leads west to the industrial town of Petaluma. The four-mile drive on Red Hill Road from Petaluma to McEvoy winds through Petaluma's residential areas into a landscape reminiscent of Virginia horse country.
The road to the McEvoy Ranch is revealed by a hand-painted sign just past the 19th century Union Schoolhouse. The dirt road leading to the farmhouse's offices traces alongside incredibly steep and vibrant hills. A mechanical iron gate reminds visitors that access to the private property is by invitation only.
Guests at the McEvoy Ranch are escorted on a walking tour west toward the gardens. Three huge live oak trees and an irrigation pond border one side of the dirt road. The silver-branched olive trees line the emerald hillsides, creating a pleasing vista of contrasting green hues. Organic cherry, Mandarin orange and Meyer lemon trees (from which McEvoy Ranch makes a tasty marmalade) are planted in neat rows near the greenhouses.
Back at the farmhouse, guests tour the mill and taste the oils.
"We tell our guests what to look for as consumers," said the tour manager, Jill Lee. "Most people don't realize what they're buying on the shelf. For example, with a Tuscan-style olive oil they would want to look for a fresh, fruity or grassy taste."
Whether the olive grove tours are cultivating sophisticated home chefs or horticulturists is hard to discern. Linda Cox-Myers, a home-textile entrepreneur from San Francisco, visited the ranch over Mother's Day weekend with eight other family members. Though she had tried the McEvoy Ranch olive oil and was "duly impressed," she said, she and her husband, who own a weekend home nearby where they've planted 10 olive trees, were "curious to see what they were doing" at the ranch. "We learned a lot about caring for our own trees," she said.
Regardless of their motivations, more people visit the McEvoy Ranch each year. Sixty people toured the ranch in 2002. In 2005, there were more than 500.
Seeing and tasting aren't the only ways to experience olive oil in wine country. The Carneros Inn offers an exfoliation spa treatment using crushed olive stones and local extra-virgin olive oil. The mixture is gently applied to the body to scrub off dead skin. With warm, damp towels, the therapist removes the paste, which is surprisingly non-oily, and finishes with a light massage using honeydew lotion.
Sure, there are plenty more vineyard-speckled country roads to explore. But the decadent treatment may leave you sidling up to the nearest bar asking for the one delight most synonymous with Napa Valley: a glass of wine, please.
If You Go
LONG MEADOW RANCH 1775 Whitehall Lane, St. Helena, Calif.; 707-963-4555; www.longmeadowranch.com.
Visitor programs include a wine and olive oil tour at 10:30 a.m. on Saturdays for $35 a person. All tours are by reservation only and limited to 10 guests.
ROUND POND 886 Rutherford Crossroads, Rutherford, Calif.; 877-963-9364; www.roundpond.com.
A tour of the olive mill, including snacks and olive oil samples, is $20 a person. A tour and tasting with a catered picnic lunch is $45 a person with a four-person minimum. All tours require reservations.
McEVOY RANCH5935 Red Hill Road, Petaluma, Calif.; 866-617-6779; www.mcevoyranch.com.
Orchard tours are available by appointment only on Saturdays from 10 a.m. until noon, through early October for $20 a person. Garden tours ($25) are offered by appointment on the second Tuesday of each month from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Lunch is available for an additional $25.
CARNEROS INN 4048 Sonoma Highway, Napa, Calif.; 888-400-9000; www.thecarnerosinn.com.
This inn's 86 guest cottages are $360 to about $1,000 a night. Spa services include an "orchard olive stone and honeydew exfoliation," $90 for a 45-minute treatment.

New York Times: Hocus-Pocus, and a Beaker of Truffles
May 16, 2007
De Gustibus
Hocus-Pocus, and a Beaker of Truffles
By DANIEL PATTERSON

A TRUFFLE by any other name may smell as sweet, but what if that name is 2,4-dithiapentane? All across the country, in restaurants great and small, the “truffle” flavor advertised on menus is increasingly being supplied by truffle oil. What those menus don’t say is that, unlike real truffles, the aroma of truffle oil is not born in the earth. Most commercial truffle oils are concocted by mixing olive oil with one or more compounds like 2,4-dithiapentane (the most prominent of the hundreds of aromatic molecules that make the flavor of white truffles so exciting) that have been created in a laboratory; their one-dimensional flavor is also changing common understanding of how a truffle should taste.
When I discovered truffle oil as a chef in the late 1990’s, I was thrilled. So much flavor, so little expense. I suppose I could have given some thought to how an ingredient that cost $60 an ounce or more could be captured so expressively in an oil that sold for a dollar an ounce. I might have wondered why the price of the oils didn’t fluctuate along with the price of real truffles; why the oils of white and black truffles cost the same, when white truffles themselves were more than twice as expensive as black; or why the quality of oils didn’t vary from year to year like the natural ingredients. But I didn’t. Instead I happily used truffle oil for several years (even, embarrassingly, recommending it in a cookbook), until finally a friend cornered me at a farmers’ market to explain what I had should have known all along. I glumly pulled all my truffle oil from the restaurant shelves and traded it to a restaurant down the street for some local olive oil.
That truffle oil is chemically enhanced is not news. It has been common knowledge among most chefs for some time, and in 2003 Jeffrey Steingarten wrote an article in Vogue about the artificiality of the oils that by all rights should have shorn the industry of its “natural” fig leaf. Instead, the use of truffle oil continued apace. The question is, Why are so many chefs at all price points — who wouldn’t dream of using vanillin instead of vanilla bean and who source their organic baby vegetables and humanely raised meats with exquisite care — using a synthetic flavoring agent?
Part of the answer is that, even now, you will find chefs who are surprised to hear that truffle oil does not actually come from real truffles. “I thought that it was made from dried bits and pieces of truffles steeped in olive oil,” said Vincent Nargi of Cafe Cluny in Manhattan, which made me put down my pen and scratch my head. The flavor of real truffles, especially black, is evanescent, difficult to capture in an oil under the best of circumstances.
But, much as I did for years, chefs want to believe. Stories of sightings of natural truffle oil abound, like a gourmand’s answer to the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. One chef told me in an excited, slightly conspiratorial tone that Jing Tio of Le Sanctuaire in Santa Monica, Calif., who sells high-quality specialty ingredients to chefs, mixed his own oil to order.
This seemed unlikely. When I asked Mr. Tio, he gave me a funny look. “Natural?” he said, rolling his eyes. “Nooo ...”
Truffle companies are secretive, and speaking to their representatives does little to illuminate their production techniques. I was told by Federico Balestra at Sabatino Tartufi that its oil is now “100 percent organic,” made from dried truffles and other ingredients with flavors “similar to truffle.” Vittorio Giordano of Urbani Tartufi called its manufacturing method, though conducted in a laboratory, a “natural process.” He described the essence that his company uses as “something from the truffle that is not the truffle.”
Whereas once truffles were hallmarks of local cooking — black in France and white in Italy — the globalization of cuisine has led to worldwide demand for an ingredient whose output continues to decline. As with some highly collectible wines, the virulent combination of high value and scarcity have created an environment ripe for fraudulent behavior. French agencies conduct chemical analyses of black truffles to ensure that they are not inferior Chinese or Spanish truffles soaked in truffle oil or juice. White truffles from other areas of Italy have been known to show up at the Alba market, summer truffles passed off as winter. But when it comes to the oil, chefs are helping to perpetuate the fraud. Why?
Call it the LVMH-ization of cooking. Truffles have become a luxury brand, one that connotes a way of life as much as a style of cooking. “Chefs use truffle oil because it’s easy to add a gloss of glamour with it — and because it helps sell dishes,” S. Irene Virbila, chief restaurant critic of The Los Angeles Times, said in an e-mail message.
Although the scent of a truffle just dug can be one of the most profound gustatory experiences of the Western world, it’s one that not many people in this country have had on truffles’ native soil. Once there were only a few expensive and exclusive restaurants that recreated that experience, which only select customers could afford. Truffle oil has simultaneously democratized and cheapened the truffle experience, creating a knockoff that goes by the same name.
The competitiveness of the restaurant scene has a lot to do with this trend. What most people know of truffles is truffle “aroma,” which has helped shape their expectations of what they’re paying for — and how much they should have to pay to get it. “Price is definitely a factor,” said Shea Gallante of Cru in Manhattan, who uses black truffle oil to reinforce the flavor of real black truffles in a midwinter pasta dish. “If I didn’t use the two drops of oil I would have to add another 8 to 10 grams of truffle,” he said, making the dish too expensive for his clientele. Many chefs agree that the quality of truffles in this country has fallen in recent years, added to the fact that every minute a truffle spends out of the ground enervates its flavor. The increased scrutiny of imported goods hasn’t helped; prolonged stays in customs might be keeping the country safe from exploding fungi, but it’s not doing much for the truffle’s aromatic intensity.
And Americans, as many were quick to note, like big flavors. “People expect the slap in the face of truffle oil,” said Jonathan Gold, the restaurant critic for LA Weekly. “They have lost their taste for subtlety; they want bigger than life flavors that are amped up with aromatics. That’s American cooking at the moment.” Many chefs are turning to truffle oil as a way to get truffle aromas that, as many chefs put it, “jump off the plate,” often dressing real truffles in the oil before sending them to the table to heighten their effect. It raises the question, What will happen when there is a synthetic heirloom tomato scent or an imitation ripe peach flavor? Are we moving toward an era of fake food?
Probably not. Truffle oil seems unique in this regard. Most chefs I spoke with said they were undisturbed by its artificiality, although they are quite concerned with its “proper” usage, which chiefly comes down to restraint: less, in this case, is more. This is curious, considering that the same chefs will say in the next breath that the best way to use real truffles is in profusion. Some call truffle oil “authentic” only when used in conjunction with real truffles, while others maintain that they like it for what it is, something altogether different.
“I used to use white truffle oil a lot, but now I only use a little bit in my liquid black truffle ravioli,” Grant Achatz of Alinea in Chicago told me. “It adds a little more perfume, a slightly different flavor. I cut my teeth cooking at the French Laundry, and when we were using truffles there was always a bottle close by. But after I was on my own for a while I started to ask myself why I was using it, and I didn’t have a good answer. It doesn’t even taste like truffle.”
Chris L’Hommedieu, chef de cuisine at Michael Mina in San Francisco, used truffle oils during his tenure as chef de cuisine at Per Se in New York, although he said he never developed a taste for them. But when asked how much of his aversion to truffle oil was due to its artificiality, he told me: “One hundred percent. I learned that from Jean-Louis.”
Mr. L’Hommedieu’s recollection involved the late chef Jean-Louis Palladin, with whom he worked at Palladin, a Manhattan restaurant that is now closed. Returning from a trip out of town, Mr. Palladin was enraged to walk into the kitchen and find that in his absence bottles of truffle oil had cropped up everywhere. Grabbing two of them, he called the staff out to the alley behind the restaurant where the garbage was held. He hurled the oil at the side of the building, smashing the glass bottles against the wall. “It’s full of chemicals,” he screamed at his confused and frightened staff members, who scrambled back to the kitchen through the gathering scent of truffle oil mingled with the fetid air of the alley. “No more!”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Daniel Patterson is the chef and owner of Coi, a restaurant in San Francisco. With this column, De Gustibus returns to The New York Times as an occasional forum for various writers to employ opinion, argument or provocation in reflections on food or drink.