Italy’s liquid gold

ANY day now, I expect to open my mail and find an introductory, just-in-time-for-Christmas gift subscription offer for Olive Oil Spectator -- or perhaps The Olive Oil Advocate.

Boutique olive oil -- designer olive oil, artisanal olive oil -- seems to be the newest object of affection (if not, indeed, obsession) among chefs and home cooks alike. Alain Ducasse touts olive oil in his winter menu and mailer, and gourmet stores and wine shops from Los Angeles to New York have shelves filled with extra virgin olive oil in bottles from so many different producers, and in so many different shapes and sizes, that it’s beginning to feel like the perfume department in a large airport’s duty-free store.

Turri. Trampetti. Mancianti Affiorato. Angela Consiglio’s Tenuta Rocchetta. Everyone has a preferred producer, and the “hot” oil of the moment changes faster than you can say Badia a Coltibuono. My new favorites are made in Tuscany by Armando Manni. I wince at the cost (about $26.40 for a tiny 3.4-ounce bottle), but the oils taste rich and pure and fresh. When I learned that several of America’s best chefs -- Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Charlie Trotter among them -- also love this oil, I wasn’t surprised.

“It’s the most full-flavored, luscious oil I’ve ever tasted,” Trotter says. “It’s so special -- with a strong, forward-fruit flavor and just the right acidic note -- that using it is a little like using truffles or caviar. You want it as unadorned as possible. I spoon a little over a piece of delicately steamed fish.”

The man behind this liquid silk is Armando Manni, a 47-year-old former photographer and documentary filmmaker. Manni -- not a man given to understatement (or underselling) -- says his oils are the best and most healthful in the world, thanks in part to the monitoring and measuring they’re subjected to by the Department of Pharmaceutical Science at the University of Florence.

A bit ‘like Viagra’?

Revolutionary production, bottling and shipping methods make his olive oil an effective agent, Manni says, in the battle against heart disease, cancer and aging. “It even works like Viagra,” he’d assured me with a wink and a leer when we first met in Los Angeles.

Manni says his oil, made with olives grown about 12 miles from Montalcino, in southern Tuscany, is produced from an assemblage of seven different cuvees, from different soils, “much like wine in Bordeaux. We harvest at the perfect point of the maturation of the olives in terms of the polyphenols that are important as anti-oxidants. A great extra virgin olive oil might have 100 to 250 milligrams of polyphenol per liter. A lot of our mountain crus have more than 450.”

Manni actually makes two oils: a fruity, delicate oil called Per mio Figlio (For my Son) and a more full-bodied, vaguely peppery Per me (For me). He rhapsodized anew about both when my wife and son and I had dinner with him in August at one of his favorite restaurants, Colline Ciociare, in the hillside village of Acuto, 50 miles east of Rome.

The chef, Salvatore Tassa, used Manni’s oil that night in a simple dish--spaghettini, tossed in a skillet with the oil and aged Parmigiano-Reggiano. But it was transcendent in its very simplicity--light and chewy and flavorful, the olive oil and the Parmigiano clinging to and enriching each strand of pasta.

As my family beamed its collective approval, Manni proclaimed, “The chef could only make this dish with my olive oil”--at which point, he leaped up from the table, marched into the kitchen and returned with chef Tassa in tow.

Tassa is 46 and barrel-chested, with biceps that threatened to split his short-sleeved shirt. He has dark, hooded eyes and an intense, almost brooding mien. He smiled -- not without effort, it seemed -- and he and Manni launched into an animated colloquy in rapid-fire Italian, with Manni translating:

“He says he uses my olive oil in this dish because the fresh taste of pure olive in my oil goes best with the fattiness and the richness of the Parmigiano. He says some olive oils don’t smell so good when they’re in the pan but mine has an elegant smell. He says he needs an oil that is always the same during the year and doesn’t change its taste and smell as the year goes on.”

I don’t speak Italian, so I had to trust Manni -- and I realized, of course, that his translation sounded like a late-night television commercial. He is, I quickly learned, a promoter-cum-proselytizer who could be the love child of P.T. Barnum and Aimee Semple McPherson.

But I’ve since heard similar comments from other chefs.

“When you open the bottle, it’s like biting into a ripe green olive,” Vongerichten says. “I make my own olive oil at the house I have in the south of France, so I know a little bit about it, and this is an incredible olive oil.”

Waiters at Jean Georges pour small amounts of Manni’s two oils in dishes on every table before the start of dinner, “so they can be used just like butter,” Vongerichten says. The chef also drizzles it on bay scallops and a couple of other special dishes

Locally, Manni’s oil is used at Vincenti in Brentwood, where chef Tassa--whose dinner at Colline Ciociare was the best meal of our two weeks in Italy--will be cooking two or three dinners late next month, with menus designed around the oil.

Vincenti chef Nicola Mastronardi drizzles the Per mio Figlio in homemade minestrone and the broccoli soup with potato ravioli and sun-dried tomatoes, he says. “It helps bring out the natural flavors of the vegetables. I also like the way the oil is packaged, in small bottles, so it stays as fresh as possible.”

With most good olive oils available in bottles ranging from 12 to 24 ounces and larger, Manni’s 3.4-ounce bottle is a big selling point; the oil stays fresher longer, and the special dark glass he uses helps protect the oil against damaging ultraviolet rays. To prevent oxidation from contact with air trapped after bottling, Manni also uses inert gases before sealing the bottles, preserving the oil much as various devices now preserve leftover wine by pumping similar gas into the bottle.

Online sales exclusively

Manni’s oil is also different in that it’s only available through his Web site (www.manni. biz). Unwilling to lose control over storage and freshness, he refuses to sell it through stores.

The oil comes in two-bottle packs -- two of the same oil or one of each -- but it’s sold only by the case: five two-packs per case. Cost: 265 euros (about $264, or $26.40 a bottle) for 10 bottles.

Ouch!

“Maybe friends could buy together,” Manni suggests, hopefully. “They could share the cost and share the oil. I can’t send one box to one customer; it would be too expensive. Most people who send olive oil to the U.S. ship it, and it either suffers from the heat or it’s put in coolers that make it too cold.

“I think of my olive oil like wine, and you know how temperature affects wine. So I fly my oil from Italy to the U.S. by FedEx, with special packing to maintain the proper temperature and chemical values. The price includes all that.”

For all his missionary zeal, Manni is relatively new to olive oil. He was born in Rome, studied economics in college, then became a photographer and, in the late 1970s, turned to movie making. He filmed documentaries for 10 years, mostly for television, and wrote a couple of movie scripts. But when his son Lorenzo was born in 1997, the combination of mad cow disease and the early deaths, from heart attacks, of his father and grandfather prompted him to “research on what I could feed Lorenzo to keep him healthy.

“Being Italian, it’s not surprising I settled on olive oil.”

A year later, he began working with the University of Florence. Last year, he started selling the oil -- 8,000 small bottles. This year he figures to sell 27,000.

“This is a small business,” he says, with uncharacteristic (and not altogether persuasive) modesty. “It’s more a mission and a pleasure than a profit-making venture. Once I get it up and really going, I’ll go back to the movies. I have this script already written, a love story between a Japanese and an Italian, with food as the milieu and.... “

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.