California's super-rich get into the grove

Tim Cornwell meets the olive growers who want to make the finest oil in the world

THE country estate Nan Tucker McEvoy is shaping in the rolling hills of northern California has swans, a swimming pool and dry-stone walls being chipped into perfect shape under the eye of a master craftsman, but such features are common in this enclave of the rich. What distinguishes her ranch are the rows of silver-green bushes spreading out across the hillsides - young olive trees, nearly 12,000 of them.

Three decades ago, it was the California wine industry that was the preserve of wealthy hobbyists. Napa and Sonoma labels are now well-established in the US and world markets. Ms McEvoy, the 78-year-old former chairwoman of the San Francisco Chronicle board, whose personal fortune has been reported at $360m (pounds 220m), is the most prominent of a small group of pioneers gambling their time, effort and cash on trying to do with California olive oil what has been achieved with wine: to rival the top producers of Europe.

The newspaper heiress bought the 550-acre ranch a few years back. She was required to supply an agricultural purpose for the building she planned. "Most of my neighbours had milk cows," she said. "Having had cows on a ranch in Oregon, I thought I knew enough about cows to say no. Then I thought sheep, but we have coyotes, and they love to eat baby sheep. If in California you try to kill a coyote, the animal people will have you. I decided that was a fight I couldn't win, and didn't want to. Now, we were zeroing in on the olives."

Olive trees were planted in California by Spanish missionaries 200 years ago, to produce oil for the sacraments. Areas around Los Angeles once boasted large commercial groves, but the industry withered in the face of cheap and tasty Spanish and Italian imports. A handful of Italian-American farm families in California have been in the oil business for decades, selling mainly by word of mouth. California olives are mostly the fat, black Mission variety, which are canned and sold for use in pizzas or salads. The oil they produce is typically golden in colour and buttery in taste, quite different from the piquant greens of Europe. For that reason, Ms McEvoy and others have opted to look overseas for trees.

So far, the new producers are marketing their product mostly as a novelty item, sold in fancy groceries in designer bottles at perfume prices. There are plenty of pitfalls in the process of grinding the olives to a paste, cold-pressing them (for extra virgin oil) and bottling the oil. The biggest expense is labour: while olive trees are hardier than vines, they still need irrigation. It is "a tough, tough life", said Judith Taylor, currently completing a book on the history of California oil. "Unless you are independently wealthy, forget it."

Ms McEvoy, of course, has the wealth. She has hired a Tuscan consultant, Maurizio Castelli, to craft a classy six-olive blend she describes as "fruity, with a little bite to it". She found a designer to create a label featuring the local blue-tailed salamander beloved by her grandchildren, and put it on square-shouldered glass bottles imported from Italy. The oil retails for $15 (pounds 9) for 250ml. Tasting facilities and an "oil education centre" are under construction at her ranch, and a ballroom is already in place. A state-of-the-art oil extraction system could produce as much as 6,000-7,000 gallons a season.

Up the road in Healdsburg, 46-year-old Ridgely Evers, creator of a best- selling accounting software package and, until recently, head of an Internet business news service, has 4,500 trees on 22 acres. Like Ms McEvoy, he imported his saplings from Tuscany. He had the satisfaction this year of having his "DaVero" oil branded extra virgin by the International Olive Oil Council, and praised by food critics for its subtle nuances.

Mr Evers got into olive oil after watching friends "lose their shirts" in the wine business. Having sunk a six-figure sum in his trees - Ms McEvoy is rumoured to have spent far more - he is just starting to break even.

Some top vineyards are beginning to diversify into olive oil. The BR Cohn vineyard in nearby Sonoma, owned and run by Bruce Cohn, former manager of the Doobie Brothers, is one. It is an open secret that the Cohn oil's selling power depends as much on the packaging as on the product, selling for $50 (pounds 30) for half a litre in long-necked, hand-etched and numbered "elegantissima" bottles. At these prices, no one is going to be frying chips - though they could mix the oil with the vineyard's champagne vinegar.

The manager and partner in Mr Cohn's Olive Hill Oil Company is Greg Reisinger, a former management consultant. He too is struggling just to cover costs, working for little or no salary. But "we are definitely seeing a growth in the business", he insists. The key is to make consumers as discriminating about oil as they are about wine. Mr Cohn and Ms McEvoy's oil is sold by Dean and DeLuca, a gourmet delicatessen chain based in New York.

California, thought to produce less than one per cent of the world's olive oil, cannot afford economies of scale. But although Americans produce and consume only a tiny fraction of the world supply, boosters of the business say the only way is up.