I’m no scholar of French literature, but I think it’s fair to say that my ineluctable connection to olive oil has roots that parallel Proust’s madeleine remembrance and its arc of sensory awakening. At around six years of age, I experienced a largely unconscious but unforgettable olfactory impression of olive oil. I was drawn to the scent embedded within a fountain pen set that was encased in olive wood (no doubt seasoned with oil after carving). Its musky, spicy, vegetal aromas entranced me. Shortly thereafter, when I discovered a lonely bottle of olive oil (consigned by my mother to the purgatory of our refrigerator) that echoed that compelling aromatic quilt, a cabinet of wonders began to open for me.
These aromatic stepping stones were part of the overarching ignition of my curiosity about smell, food, and flavor. As the fifth of five children in a raucous family, getting my mother’s attention was no easy feat. It turned out, though, that my best opportunity for achieving that was to go to the grocery store with her, where she indulged me in allowing me to choose anything that drew my eye. Provoked to expand my sense of taste, this led to yogurt, papayas, and artichokes first landing in our home (and on my palate). Using a recipe for preparing artichokes that prescribed adding olive oil to the boiling water, an appreciation of its flavor-enhancing possibilities began to emerge for me.
Admittedly, I can recall a brief period when I was a picky eater. Nevertheless, our boomer family’s growing appetite for the pleasures of food and accruing cosmopolitanism made it impossible to remain on the culinary sideline. As such, at a very early age, I was drawn to cooking as a model of enticing transformation and pleasure. I can’t say that I received any instruction per se, but hunger and osmosis spurred the development of my sense of taste and led to a steady accumulation of kitchen skills. As adolescence set in, I was inspired by the belief that cooking for oneself (and sharing with others) was a metric of independence and social opportunity. The cultural impact that food can make (even in provincial Oklahoma) was increasingly evident. Gravitating to the indispensable value and culinary magic of olive oil, in retrospect, seems like a foreordained scenario for me.
Simultaneous to my culinary awakening, I was increasingly drawn to the arts overall and my own painting practice. The creative possibilities presented by an exploration of food and flavor organically became ‘of a piece’ in my life’s priorities overall. That my father was an avid imbiber of wine and fine spirits (reinforcing another notion of discernment within the scope of an enticing table) helped precipitate an understanding of how flavor is often a function of place. Olive oil didn’t immediately fit into that nascent template, but at age 20, when I started to travel to Europe, it didn’t take long for my developing geo-locating matrix of taste to absorb that insight.
Fast-forwarding to my later 20s, there’s no doubt that my romance with Alice Waters was a game-changer in my sensory/culinary consciousness. Before we coupled, I was already much drawn to the culinary philosophy that had coalesced at Chez Panisse. Our marriage and family experience, though, imparted a seamless immersion into the universe of Chez Panisse and its unrelenting focus on the importance of beautiful ingredients and the clarity of flavor they can provide. From that first time that we shared a perfectly grilled piece of levain bread, anointed with extra virgin olive oil and salt, and scraped with raw garlic, my original Proustian moment of revelation was reaffirmed.
While my daughter Fanny was in utero, the germinated seed of my lifelong professional engagement with wine entered a log phase of growth. The wine store and tasting bar that I opened in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood was the primary engine for that. In the early ’80s, as the California wine industry was really getting into high gear (matching the momentum of the gastronomic awakening occurring throughout the state), a mushrooming roster of talented boutique wine importers was scouring Europe to slake the thirst and curiosity of an energized American audience. My store was heavily informed by many of the various imported treasures they brought to our shores along with many of the most intriguing vinous quests that Oregon and California winemakers were pursuing.
Inspired by their model of bringing home the goods, and coupled with an ongoing fascination with things Italian and the force multiplier flavor medium that olive oil represented, my entrepreneurial instincts spurred me to echo their model. As the flavor locus of Chez Panisse (and both Alice’s and my palate) was increasingly gravitating to Italy, the idea of securing a superb source of Tuscan oil for our use at the restaurant was an obvious thing to pursue. As these kinds of notions often go, it turned out to be an astute direction to take—on a business, culinary, and, of course, lifestyle basis. It followed logically to expand my efforts to supply the alluring Tuscan oils I was importing for the kitchen of Chez Panisse to other restaurants, stores, and passionate cooks. Moving to create and label a proprietarily blended oil of my own got me closer to the means of production and helped cement an understanding both of the agricultural subtleties of olive farming and how to build flavor through blending.
In the second decade of my olive (and balsamic vinegar) importing enterprise, I fulfilled a long-fantasized desire to acquire land in Sonoma County for the purpose of planting vines, olive trees, and building my dream house. Having been engaged with pretty much every other aspect of the wine and olive oil business, I got to embark on the acquisition of a whole new canon of understanding. Connecting to the process of cultivating grapes and olives and shepherding their yields into the bottle allowed me to mine my sense of taste while opening up new understandings about how site and craft shape and define flavor.
These last twenty-two years, as our vines and trees have matured, have provided an unmatched source of understanding about how to cultivate and build flavor from the ground up. I’m also thrilled to share that every year as the olives approach their harvest debut, my excitement about the rush of freshly pressed emerald-tinted oil is unabated. Experiencing a world informed and propelled by your well-honed senses has forever remained a source of pleasure, understanding, and beauty.
– Stephen Singer
I’m no scholar of French literature, but I think it’s fair to say that my ineluctable connection to olive oil has roots that parallel Proust’s madeleine remembrance and its arc of sensory awakening.
