When we arrived, Urruti—a large and voluble red-faced man with slicked-back hair—was in his small gift shop surrounded by dilapidated wooden chairs and yellowing photos of the legendary bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez and Ordóñez’s pal Ernest Hemingway. He led us outside to his presses and settling tanks, which are a century old and flecked with the acrid remnants of dried olives, and then he launched into a lecture on how the centrifuge epitomizes the evils of modernity. “They call what they make ‘extra virgin,’ ” he snorted, “but they’re spinning it around—they’re touching it!—six thousand times a minute. Extra virgin! As if Joseph never even looked at the Virgin Mary!”
I didn’t buy any of Urruti’s inexpensive, opaque olive oil, and Davies felt my restraint was wise. “You wouldn’t have liked it,” he said. “A lot of people speak of the old days, precentrifuge, as some sort of lost Eden. But that’s bollocks, I say. Cold pressing is dirtier—you get leaves in the oil, and dirt.”
I knew what he meant. Extra virgin is a label awarded to the purest oils, whose acidity level is below 0.8 percent, and since pH is a function of how much debris is in the oil, a lot of cold-press oil is simply “virgin.” I’d tasted some virgin earlier at a roadside café and found it gummy and sandy.
Still, I harbored my own Edenic visions, so the next day, alone, in the rain, I drove east, past Córdoba and through the dry, rolling landscape into the village of Castro del Río, where there was a museum with a modest restaurant, Oleocultura, decorated with old black iron hydraulic olive presses and several scales. The waiter-cook, Diego Alva, brought out a plate of pitted olives he’d cured himself in garlic, fennel, and lemon and showed me how he’d extracted the pits one by one using a little wooden device, a partida. “It takes time,” he said, “but no problem. You are talking with friends. You are drinking.”
I savored a single glass of red wine myself, and then I drove farther east. In the village of Baena, there is a small mill, Núñez de Prado, which for four generations has been favored by Spain’s royal family. Núñez de Prado makes exquisite cold-press oil using looming iron machines that are at once amiably antique and antiseptically clean. The principal is 64-year-old Francisco Núñez de Prado, a Ph.D. in international law who three decades ago left his budding career as a diplomat to run his family’s business—which he does with erudite aplomb.
I found Núñez de Prado by the hearth in his office, amid several gilt-framed letters from kings. He regarded my hopes of attaining a palate with skepticism. “For olive oil,” he said, “you need twenty years. How many types of bitter are there?How many green colors are there that you’ll feel on your tongue?Hundreds.”
To educate me, Núñez de Prado drove me up into his family’s vast groves—over a rolling dirt road through legions of Picual trees. He piloted his Range Rover slowly, veering off the road to inspect individual trees and getting so close that the branches scratched at the roof. The trees were a woolly profusion of branches, and the ground underneath a mess of high, wild grass. I brought up the “10 brothers” theory of pruning, and Núñez de Prado quietly snickered. “That’s like saying that if you are producing small people, and not tall ones, you are producing big brains,” he said. “It is nonsense. We will let the trees grow. Our oil is organic—all natural.”
Soon we passed some workers picking up a last few fallen olives. Núñez de Prado gave them a lordly wave and then drove on, past lichen-specked boulders and around hilly turns, looking down into the drizzle at the spidery trees stretching into the distance. He said nothing, but he seemed bemused, happy. “Stendhal,” he told me, “once said that the two best ways for a man to waste time are culture and agriculture. With olive oil, I think, I have wasted my time very well.”
Bill Donahue writes for Men’s Journal and Mother Jones.
Comments (0)
Open / Close