Encore Provence (22 page)

It was Régis who attempted to put me straight, as he so often does. If I wanted venerable trees—anything from one hundred to three hundred years old—he knew a man from Beaumes-de-Venise who could help. There is a microclimate near Beaumes-de-Venise, a pocket of land where olive trees grow thick on the hills, and Régis’s friend would be delighted to dig up some prime old specimens for me. Just two minor conditions, Régis said, would have to be observed: Payment would have to be in cash, and delivery of the trees would need to be made at night.

“Why is that?” I asked. “Aren’t the trees his?”

Régis spread both hands, palms down, in front of him, and waggled them as if he were trying to keep his balance.
“Not exactly,” he said. “But they will be. Hell inherit them from his father.”

“But his father has to die first.”

“
Tout à fait
,” said Régis. “That’s why they have to be moved at night, so the neighbors don’t see anything. The old boy won’t know. He never goes out.”

Somehow I didn’t find the idea of an illicit olive grove very appealing, and so I asked Régis if he knew of a more respectable tree dealer.

“Well, they exist,” he said. “But you have to be careful. They import the trees.” He raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “You wouldn’t want
Italian
trees, would you?” From the tone of his voice, it sounded as though they suffered from some incurable disease. But of course they weren’t French, and this, as far as Régis was concerned, disqualified them from any serious consideration.

In fact, he made me realize that I wasn’t at all sure what I wanted. Old trees, certainly. Beautiful trees. But what kind of trees? I’d read enough to know that there were at least a dozen different varieties growing in Provence, some smaller than others, some more resistant to extreme cold and the unwelcome attentions of the olive fly, some that gave a bigger crop—useful as general background information, but lacking in the kind of detail necessary for a potential grove-owner. What I needed was someone who could tell a confused novice whether to plant
salonenque
,
picholine
, or
aglandau
, when and where to plant, how to fertilize and prune. What I needed was a professor of olives.

Experts are not difficult to find in Provence. All the bars I know are full of them, but the trick is to meet an expert whose knowledge is equal to his enthusiasm. This time, I
was lucky. A friend knew of a man—
un homme sérieux
—who had a small but growing business devoted to olive oil, and not just the oil of his native Haute Provence. He had started to do for olive oil what
négociants
have traditionally done for wine: finding the best from the hundreds of growers and thousands of groves scattered around the Mediterranean basin. That was his patch, and it included Andalusia, Catalonia, Crete, Galilee, Greece, Sardinia, Tuscany, the Atlas mountains—wherever good oil was made. His name, appropriately enough, was Olivier, his company was called Oliviers & Co., and his head office was in the village of Mane, not far from Forcalquier.

It’s a small village, and a modest head office—an old stone house, plain and substantial. The offices are upstairs, and on the ground floor is a shop where the visitor can browse among an international selection of oils. Not only browse, but sample; bottles and stubby porcelain tasting spoons are laid out on the table so that you can sip before you buy. You can compare, for instance, an oil from Andalusia with one from Chianti, or another from the valley of Les Baux—first-pressing extra virgins, all of them, each made from a different type of olive, each with its own highly distinctive bouquet and flavor, and each with its own particular color, a range of delicate shades from jade green to a fine transparent gold. Olive oils, as I discovered during my first half hour, can vary in character as much as wine. Even my palate, a sadly abused organ that morning after too many jolts of turbo-charged coffee, could distinguish between them.

The similarities with wine were emphasized by the tasting notes for each oil. These were written in language that had echoes of the
cave:
hints of citrus and blackcurrant
buds, of artichokes and pepper, of fresh herbs—words and phrases that you might hear bandied about by those grand old men with florid noses who hold court in the cellars of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The one major difference is that there’s no point in laying down a few cases of oil for your self-indulgent old age. Unlike many wines, oil doesn’t improve with the years; young is best.

With my palate now well lubricated and my teeth still slick with oil, I went upstairs to meet Olivier. Dark, shorthaired, and bespectacled, he has a quiet and academic air about him, and a scholarly vocabulary to go with it, as I found when I asked him to explain a phrase that had puzzled me ever since I first saw it displayed on a bottle of oil from Lucca, in Italy.
Extra vérgine
.

I could never understand how anything could be extra virgin. This has always seemed to me like describing a woman as extra pregnant. How can there be degrees of virginity? I’d assumed it to be one of those flights of Italian self-promotion—my virgin is better than your virgin—that served no purpose other than to look impressive on a label.

Olivier looked at me over the top of his glasses. “In fact,” he said, “there are three stages of virginity. All olive oil contains free fatty acids. To be described as extra virgin, an oil must contain less than one percent of these acids. More than one percent but less than one and a half, and you have a
vierge fine
. Anything above this, up to 3.3 percent, can only qualify as virgin.” He smiled. “Virgin
ordinaire
. You understand?”

He went on to talk about vintages of olive oil, the aging process that oils go through from the moment of pressing (extra virgin keeps longer than the lesser virgins, I was pleased to hear), and we were just getting into the deeper
waters of organoleptic traits—taste factors, to you and me—when Olivier looked at his watch and said it was time to go.

As we drove to Forcalquier for that most essential part of the Gallic learning process, a long and well-considered lunch, the lesson continued. I was already aware that olive oil is good for you in a general sense, but I had no idea of some of the more refined applications. For example, oil beaten up with an egg yolk makes a face mask guaranteed to nourish the driest complexion. Oil laced with essence of rosemary takes the soreness out of stiff and aching muscles. A mixture of oil and green mint rubbed on to the temples is said to do wonders for migraine sufferers. For those about to suffer—from having too much to eat and drink—a tablespoon of oil taken neat before the start of any wretched excess coats the stomach lining, tempers the hangover, and assures a smooth and well-ordered
transit intestinal
. Relief is also promised from constipation, as well as from that particularly French national ailment, the
crise de foie
(a rebellion of the liver following a surfeit of rich food and an ill-advised second bottle of heavy wine). And so, since it keeps your innards in such prime working order, it follows that generous daily doses of extra virgin help you live longer. All in all, Olivier managed to make olive oil seem like a panacea for everything that ails man short of a broken leg.

Perhaps some of these are exaggerated claims, but I was happy to believe them. There are so many things in life I enjoy, from sun to cigars, which I’m told are bad for me that a healthy pleasure is a rare treat. Anyway, I wasn’t about to argue as we arrived in Forcalquier and made our way across the main square to the restaurant with a curious name—Le Lapin Tant Pis—and a chef, Gérard Vives,
whom I wish I had as a neighbor. The chef was joining us for lunch, always a reassuring sign, and so were two of Olivier’s colleagues. Not for the first time, I found myself an ignoramus among experts.

Olivier produced a bottle of his latest discovery, a local oil from Les Mées, and this we had to taste before lunch started in earnest. I was half expecting porcelain tasting spoons to be whipped out of pockets, but the technique here was a little more rustic. Bread was distributed, that irresistible, resilient bread which gives under a gentle squeeze from the fingers. Pieces were torn from the loaf, and I watched the professionals on either side of me using their thumbs to make small indentations in their bread. The bottle was passed, and the indentations were filled with oil. Heads were lowered, and noses were applied to take in the bouquet. Then, with restrained, birdlike sips, the oil was tasted, held in the mouth and swirled around the back teeth before being swallowed. Then we ate the bread, licked our thumbs, and had some more.

This is only one of several tasting methods, and simpler than most. In Corsica, for instance, they put a few drops of oil into the hand, and warm them with a finger. Whether you then lick the hand or the finger depends, so I’m told, on the Corsican. Or there’s the potato method, in which oil is drizzled on to pieces of steamed potato, with a mouthful of apple eaten in between tasting to clear the palate. In every case, a few deep breaths are recommended to mix air with the oil in your mouth, which releases all those organoleptic traits. This sounds easy enough until you try it. You discover, quickly and embarrassingly, that some practice is required before you master the knack of holding the oil in your half-open mouth without dribbling. When tasters are gathered together, you
can always tell a beginner by his oily chin; in this case, mine.

But at least I was able to keep enough in my mouth to appreciate it; a lovely oil, spicy, with a very faint nip of peppery bitterness at the end. Olivier told me it had been pressed from three different varieties—
aglandau, picholine
, and
bouteillan
—all of them resistant to the olive fly and hardy enough to survive the often severe Haute Provence winter. The kind of olives, perhaps, that I should think of planting.

One thing led to another, as it often does during a fine four-course lunch, and by the time we had finished I’d been invited to meet the trees that had produced the oil. The time of the harvest would be best, so Olivier said, around St. Catherine’s Day at the end of November. He could even arrange a guide—a man of passion and
grande valeur
—to instruct me as he took me through the groves.

I met Jean-Marie Baldassari at his office in Oraison, an instantly likeable man—friendly, relaxed, and with an air of calm that I’ve noticed before in people who work with nature and the seasons. He runs the local oil syndicate, and it soon became clear that the love of his professional life was the olive. A tree of great intelligence, he called it, a camel among trees, able to store enough water to keep it going through long periods of drought, an almost everlasting tree. There were some around Jerusalem, he told me, that are estimated to be two thousand years old.

In Provence, the olive has gone through some hard times, suffering from both man and nature: from freak frosts like the memorably brutal year of 1956, or from a long-lasting tendency among farmers to replace olive
groves with more profitable vineyards. (Since 1929, the number of olive trees in Provence has declined from eight million to two million.) And then there’s general neglect. You see the victims on deserted, overgrown hillsides, their trunks strangled by ropes of wild ivy, entire trees almost hidden by brambles, apparently smothered to death. Amazingly, they survive. Cut away the ivy and the brambles, clean up the area around the base of the trunk, prune the tangle of branches, and in a year or so there will be olives. The intelligent camel, so it seems, is practically indestructible, capable of springing back to life again after going through an arboreal nightmare. I could see why Jean-Marie had such an admiration for it.

But even if every neglected tree in Provence were to be restored to perfect health, the production of oil would still be tiny compared to Italy and Spain (which I later heard described as “the Kuwait of olive oil”). Provence can’t attempt to compete on quantity. It has to be quality, and as with almost everything in France that is particularly good to eat or drink, this means a highly prized classification—A.O.C., or
appellation d’origine controlée
.

An A.O.C. is similar to a manufacturer’s guarantee, with the important difference that the manufacturers can’t award it to themselves. It has to be officially sanctioned: Tests have to be conducted, production conditions scrutinized, reams of paperwork completed, and, of course, tastings organized. I like to think that working for the A.O.C. people is almost as well-fed an occupation as being a Michelin inspector. The rules are strict, whether the
appellation
is given to wine, cheese, or chickens. These have to come from the stated area (the
origine
), and the quality has to be of a sufficiently high standard to deserve the distinction. It’s a system that encourages
excellence, protects against imitations, and lets customers know exactly what they can expect to get for their money. Two Provençal oils, from Nyons and Les Baux, already have A.O.C. status, and the oils of Haute Provence will have joined them by the end of 1999.

“
Bon
,” said Jean-Marie. “So much for facts and figures. I expect you’d like to see some oil.”

There are seven working mills in Haute Provence, and our first stop was the Moulin des Pénitents outside Les Mées. Driving north along straight, empty roads, we were heading toward the Montagne de Lure, with its winter cap of snow. The day was bright and hard, and I didn’t envy the olive-pickers who had been out there on the hills since early morning. To make a single liter of oil takes five kilos, or more than ten pounds, of olives, and no machine yet invented can pick the fruit without damaging the tree. Olives must be harvested by hand. I wondered how long the fingers would last before they froze. As Jean-Marie said, you have to love the trees to do the work.

The shock for a newly picked olive, after a brief lifetime of peace and quiet, must be considerable. It might have been tenderly plucked from the tree, but conditions go rapidly downhill from there: tossed into a sack, bundled into a van, and delivered into the cacophony of a mechanical torture chamber. First to be washed, then to be crushed, then to be pressed, finally to be whirled around in a centrifuge.