Weekend® - Macau Daily Times

Weekend Times
ThE grey pearls burst
on the tongue to release
their salty, marine
aroma, lifted by notes
of nut or fruit. Caviar
remains the ultimate luxury food –
except these days the Caspian delicacy
likely comes from a farm near
you.
Exports of wild sturgeon eggs –
culled to make caviar – have been
severely restricted since 1998 under
UN quotas set to protect the species
from chaotic overfishing after the fall
of the soviet Union.
For the past two years, there have
been next-to-no wild sturgeon’s eggs
available on world markets, save for
22
Armen Petrossian poses in Paris
black gold trafficked out illegally
from the five countries that share the
Caspian sea shores.
Deprived of wild raw material, caviar
houses turned towards an alternative
source, like France’s armen Petrossian,
whose armenian father introduced
the delicacy to Paris in the
1920s and who started using farmed
eggs in 1998.
today Petrossian – a veritable caviar
“tsar” whose specialist boutiques
account for 15 percent of the world
market – works exclusively with
farms, as do his global competitors.
Farmed caviar – whose pearls range
in colour from honey to dark grey
– can offer the “best or the worst”,
Caviar: t
from a f
Petrossian told aFP at his flagship
Paris store, wearing trademark waxed
moustache and bow tie.
“there is nothing generic about
caviar – it’s a complex product,” he
said. “We select and refine the eggs,
we let them mature. it’s a job as important
as a winegrower who transforms
his grape.”
Petrossian sources from a network
of producers in southwestern France,
but also in the United states, China
and Bulgaria, working with them to
improve the quality of the raw material.
“When we visit farms we can intervene
on the number of fish, their
food, the position of the pools, the
moment at which they cull the eggs,”
he said.
twelve years on, he claims the
farmed result can match the origi-