For the De Carlo family olives mean home, not only because their family tree has intertwined with their groves and with oil-making for the last four centuries, but literally as well; their house is perched atop their mill like the keep of a castle. The impression of defensiveness at casa De Carlo is accentuated by the imposing security wall which rings the property, as well as the surveillance cameras which film everyone who approaches the main gate and project them on screens inside the house. Local producers are periodically held up by armed oil bandits, who drive tanker trucks with high-pressure pumps to siphon oil out of storage silos. “After a certain hour we don’t open the gates,” Saverio said as we returned to the house for lunch, after touring the De Carlo groves. Francesco and Marina were waiting for us beside a large olive-wood fire, Francesco resting his head in his sister’s lap as they ate pickled cima di Mola olives from a small porcelain bowl and tossed the pits onto the coals. (Olive pits are an excellent fuel, and oil-makers often sell their olive pomace—the solid residue from oil extraction, consisting mostly of crushed pits—to electric companies and other industries, to be burned in furnaces.)
Grazia knelt on the hearth beside them, and set several pounds of suckling lamb on a grill over the coals to cook. While the meat sizzled and popped and we watched the little eruptions of flame from each drip of fat, she told a true story of poisoning, blindness, and death, and said she half wished it would happen again.
In March 1986, she said, hospitals in northwest Italy began to admit dozens of people suffering from acute nausea, lack of coordination, fainting spells, and blurred vision. Twenty-six died, and twenty more went blind. Investigators eventually discovered that each victim had recently drunk a local white wine; several producers, they found, had been raising the alcohol levels of their wines by cutting them with methanol, a highly toxic substance also called wood alcohol. The scandal, and the resulting government crackdown, devastated the Italian wine industry. Consumption plummeted, and hundreds of producers, most of them honest, went bankrupt. Ultimately, however, the crisis radically improved Italian wine-making and forced a generalized shift from quantity to quality.
“Before the methanol scandal, people around here didn’t make wine like this,” Grazia said, pouring glasses of Rivera Il Falcone 2004, a garnet-red wine made from a local grape varietal, nero di Troia, by a producer at Castel del Monte, a nearby medieval castle. “And even if they had, nobody would have bought it. Most people just bought their wine in big jugs without labels. You’d see them on tables in restaurants, where they’d been sitting open for days. Most people wouldn’t dream of buying a bottle of wine with a label on it.”
After the methanol crisis, consumers grew more particular, and the producers who survived the market consolidation learned to use techniques and technology pioneers by French enologists. “After the scandal, producers started creating brand names they were proud of and wanted to defend. Only after methanol did people start thinking about what they were buying and drinking, and become willing to pay for the good stuff. And only after methanol did the government get really serious about checking quality, and making sure that the bottle contained just what the label said.” During the 1990s, dozens of premier Italian wines emerged, and wine became a major export product (wine recently topped $1 billion in annual sales in Italy).
Grazia brought the wine to her lips, then stopped and put it down without tasting it. “In olive oil, we’re where the wine-makers were before methanol,” she said. “We’re stuck in the dark ages.” She shook her head disconsolately. “It would be awful to see my children’s livelihood damaged, even destroyed. And I’d certainly never want to see anyone hurt. But sometimes I wish there could be a methanol scandal in olive oil, which would obliterate this corrupt industry completely, and rebuild it in a healthy way. It’s been Babylon around here for far too long.”
Our lunch began with a succession of seasonal vegetables, mostly from the De Carlos’ own garden: lampascioni, a small wild hyacinth bulb marinated in oil and vinegar; meaty, densely flavored cherry tomatoes; puntarelle, the tender tips of a local chicory; and flat little artichokes as big around as a pound coin or a quarter, lightly fried. “Pugliesi eat an incredible amount of vegetables—we’re like goats,” said Francesco, a rangy twenty-four-year-old with a crew cut and large, dark, serious eyes that watch you unblinkingly, though their intensity is softened by a faint, unsarcastic smile that never leaves his lips. He holds a degree in food quality and a diploma in olive oil tasting from the University of Naples and recently launched a De Carlo line of vegetables in extra virgin olive oil: mushrooms, artichokes, peppers, and other produce grown on their lands, as well as green table olives of the picholine and cima di Mola cultivars. “I introduced them to broaden our product offering so that our facilities would remain active throughout the year,” he explained. “But given the sorry state of oil prices nowadays, they’re a much higher-margin business and help us stay profitable.” His modern financial jargon was so different from his father’s homespun way of talking about the oil business that I instinctively asked if he and Saverio worked well together.
Francesco didn’t miss a beat. “No. We argue every day,” he said. “Every single day!” And when the laughter, a shade nervous, subsided, he added, with a quick, testing look at Saverio: “Disagreeing, sharing different opinions, deciding together the best way forward—that’s the best way to collaborate, no?”
For all his university training, Francesco clearly shares his father’s visceral enthusiasm for olive oil. His earliest memories also concern the family mill—such as the time, as a three-year-old, when he fell asleep in a little nest between sacks of olives, and slept through the increasingly despairing cries of his family as they searched for him amid the whirring blades and grinding wheels.
“If you’d come a couple of weeks earlier, or later, you’d be eating a completely different meal,” Francesco said, looping a green ribbon of Arcamone oil over a big bowl of a half-dozen different wild-looking greens, most of which I’d never seen before, and whose names he knew only in the local dialect, not in Italian: cuolacidd, spunzál, sevón, cicuredd. “We pugliesi are demanding about these things,” he continued as he stirred the glistening leaves. “We try to eat only vegetables and fruits that are in season. Many Italians are the same. They prefer fresh things from local gardens to the brown, tired-looking produce in supermarkets, even when local crops cost more. So why don’t they buy their oil the same way? Olives are a seasonal fruit, and olive oil is a fresh-pressed fruit juice—it’s best shortly after it’s made, and goes downhill from there. Why on earth do people buy expensive vegetables like these, and dress them with the cheapest oil they can find?”
De Carlo oil flowed for the rest of the meal, gushing over the burrata, a rich curdy cousin of mozzarella, and pooling in the little cups of the orecchiette pasta with boragine, a wild herb. At first I thought the De Carlos were showing off for me, but I soon saw that they used olive oil this way every day, choosing from the four different oils on the table the one that best fit each dish they were dressing. Saverio sloshed so much Tenuta Torre di Mossa, the family’s pepperiest oil, over his grilled lamb that the others giggled and pointed. He bobbed his head and smiled happily, the first smile I’d seen from him. “I’ve spent my whole life making oil, but I can never eat enough of it. What other job gives you this?”
He handed me the oil, and I poured some over my lamb. As if it had catalyzed subtle chemical reactions in the meat, I tasted dense new flavors which I hadn’t noticed in my previous, unoiled bites: the rosemary and santoregia Grazia had used to season it, the browned fat, the light charring from the olive-wood grill—each flavor had a new depth and intensity. The meat even felt different, more supple and juicy. This oil wasn’t just a condiment, but had entered into the dish.
When I observed this, Francesco snorted. “Try telling that to a chef!” He explained that he’d recently given an oil-tasting course in Naples to twenty head chefs of prominent restaurants, most of whom had shown the most abject ignorance about olive oil. “Each of these guys ran a top-flight restaurant, right? Some had Michelin stars. They had highly developed palates for wine and for foods of all kinds. But every last one of them was using a refined olive oil or a cut-rate extra virgin in their kitchens, and even on their tables. They’d been using bad oils so long that they didn’t even know what a good oil tasted like.”
Grazia, who had been silent for some time, spoke with sudden force. “Then we’ve got to teach them. The road we’ve got to follow is la cultura; educating people about good oil is the only way out of this crisis. Because once someone tries a real extra virgin—an adult or a child, anybody with taste buds—they’ll never go back to the fake kind. It’s distinctive, complex, the freshest thing you’ve ever eaten. It makes you realize how rotten the other stuff is, literally rotten. But there has to be a first time. Somehow we have to get those first drops of real extra virgin oil into their mouths, to break them free from the habituation to bad oil, and from the brainwashing of advertising. There has to be some good oil left in the world for people to taste.”
She stood and went into the kitchen to get dessert, leaving a sudden silence in the room. Everyone seemed to be thinking about what she’d said, and what she’d omitted: that if the economics of oil-making don’t change soon, no one will be left to make real extra virgin oil. Not even the De Carlos.