FINANCIAL TIMES Thursday december 23, 1999
» "Steel men of Brescia look to a new stream of profits"
Caviar de Venise is tempting the taste buds of Europe.

By Paul Betts.

Beluga and Sevruga will be doled out in huge spoonfuls as usual this Christmas season in the world's grand hotels and expensive restaurants.
But for the first time, caviar lovers in western Europe, the main market for the hyper-expensive spawn, are seeing a new variety, called Calvisius in most countries and Caviar de Venise in France, on the menu.
By all accounts, this new caviar is of high quality and, at $1,000 per kilogram retail, it is a bargain compared with about $4,500 per kg for Beluga and $1,400 per kg for Sevruga.
But the exotic brand names, like those on so many new food and drink products these days, conceal a startlingly modest pedigree.
Calvisius and Caviar de Venise come from the gritty steelmaking region of Brescia in northern Italy, and the sturgeon that produce them are nurtured in the warm water ponds adjacent to the steel mills.
It all started in the early 1970s when a local steelmaker, Giovanni Tolentini, decided to use the hot water from his plant near the village of Calvisano a few miles outside Brescia to breed eels. Mr Tolentini, who has since died, gave up on eels in the early 1980s when he discovered they could not be reproduced in captivity. Instead, he decided to farm white sturgeon, an aristocratic fish that spawn in fresh, preferably warm water. "The habitat was perfect," says Sandro Cancellieri, managing director of Agroittica, the steelmakers' fish farming venture. The fish started reproducing in the tanks supplied with hot water from the mill. As the females grew, the Bresciani began extracting the precious eggs. At first, they pasteurised the eggs for sale in Christmas hampers. This year, they decided to take the plunge and begin marketing fresh caviar at the peak Christmas season.
The Bresciani appear to be coming into the market at a good time. The 1991 Gulf War led to a sharp fall in Iranian caviar exports. Poaching, pollution and indiscriminate fishing continued to deplete Caspian stocks. And last year, the so-called Washington Convention included sturgeon as an endangered species and imposed strict controls on fishing and on black market caviar. (Most females are slaughtered when their eggs are removed because sewing them up again is a delicate operation.) The white sturgeon is not quite the same as its Caspian cousin that has traditionally produced the world's finest caviar. But the eggs are the appropriate size. They have an attractive pearly black colour and, above all, they taste like caviar.
The Bresciani are nothing if not ambitious. This year, they are producing two tonnes of their caviar, and they plan to increase their output to 18 tonnes over the next eight years, which would make them among the world's largest producers of caviar from bred sturgeon. It is, of course, too early to assess their chances, but anyone familiar with their history in the steel business would be inclined to take them seriously.
Starting in the late 1960s, they began building mini steel mills, believing they could produce reinforcing bars and other basic products for the construction industry at much lower cost than Europe's state- subsidised dinosaurs. They succeeded, and became for many years a headache for Brussels bureaucrats trying to bring order to the European Union's steel markets.
Their next challenge may be to convince Italians to eat caviar. Some leading restaurants have introduced it in their menus. But it remains a struggle. Italy's finest gastronomy, after all, is based on the humblest of peasant fare.