In search of France's black gold

What better way to celebrate the coming of another year than to gobble the eggs of an endangered species which has lived on the earth for 300,000 millennia? Caviar, black, slimy, salty, and not everyone's idea of an expensive delicacy, is in increasing demand as a symbol of wealth and culinary discernment. It will be consumed by the spoonful, and bucketload, at New Year parties tonight, washed down, no doubt, by that other French-produced luxury, champagne.

Caviar, a French-produced luxury? Surely not? The tiny, black, translucent blobs of the roe of the sturgeon - tantalisingly delicious or sourly disappointing, according to taste - are inextricably associated with Russia, Iran and the environmentally challenged Caspian Sea.

But a new player has quietly entered the world caviar market over the past decade: France. In 2005, French fish farms produced 17 tons of caviar, by far the largest output of any European country, apart from Russia.

The French farms, concentrated in the south-west, began almost by accident after a scientific experiment with imported Siberian sturgeon 12 years ago. They are now producing caviar which can command prices of €2,000 (£1,370) a kilo and has equalled wild Russian caviar in blind-tastings. (Some may say blind-tasting is the only way to eat caviar.) Farm-produced caviar is not new. Three fifths of Caspian production comes from sturgeon farms. But the French industry has achieved significant breakthroughs, breeding sturgeon in captivity (notoriously difficult) and developing a means of extracting the precious eggs from breeding stock without bludgeoning the mother fish to death.

Such advances could prove vital as the wealthy world's appetite for caviar grows. Stocks of the wild fish, especially in the Caspian, are now under desperate threat. Sturgeon, one of the oldest surviving species on the planet, are capable of reaching 30ft and living for a century. No fish approaching this size or age have been found in the dirty and over-fished Caspian Sea for 15 years.

A group of European ecological pressure groups issued a stark warning this month. The huge, ancient, ugly fish which lays the black golden eggs is menaced by pollution, poaching and government neglect in Russia, Iran, the other Caspian Sea nations, and even the European Union.

Strict EU rules on caviar labelling are to be imposed next year to try to control the illegal trade in sturgeon roe from the Caspian, thought to be 10 times greater than legal, quota-restricted sales. Britain is a principal destination for the illegal exports. French customs officials recently seized 36kg of contraband Caspian caviar in a lorry at the Calais end of the Channel tunnel.

The United States has already taken much tougher measures, banning all imports of beluga caviar, which comes from the largest, most sought-after and threatened of the three kinds of Caspian sturgeon. Most EU countries, including Britain, have been slow to implement even the limited regulations.

At the same time, the success of the French caviar farms - although it is a welcome means of relieving pressure on the Caspian - threatens to distract from another, slower and largely forgotten environmental catastrophe, much nearer to home.

The "new" French caviar industry is not entirely new. There was a thriving industry in wild caviar in south-west France before the Second World War, which is celebrated in a book published this month and a museum, to be opened next year. The sturgeon is far from being just a Caspian fish. There are at least 27 varieties all over the northern hemisphere. Sturgeon are believed to have existed for 300 million years (in other words for about 200 million years before the coming of the dinosaurs and for 70 million years after they disappeared).

Until the beginning of the last century, the European or Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser sturio ) was common from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It was fished off the coast of Britain and bred in most of the deep rivers of the French Atlantic coast. The original French caviar industry died in the 1950s, as the stocks of European sturgeon were destroyed by over-fishing and the dredging and industrialisation of estuaries.

The native euro-sturgeon survives only in small numbers and can be found, irregularly, in the river Gironde near Bordeaux, and its tributaries, including the Garonne and Dordogne. Attempts to revive the European sturgeon have been made for 15 years but the success of the imported species of Siberian sturgeon in French farms has overshadowed these efforts. Money is scarce.

"Illegal captures of European sturgeon are still going on," said Patrick Williot, who is in charge of the European programme to revive the species run by the French biological research agency, Cemagref. "There are reports that sturgeon were sold at fish auctions in France in 2004. And we have not been given increased money for our research for the past five years." Part of the problem is the ponderous and little-understood love-life of the sturgeon. Females produce eggs only every three or four years. For many years, the ugly, fearsome-looking but harmless fish refused to reproduce in captivity. Most caviar farms in the Caspian still depend on finding small female fish in the wild to grow in captivity until they are old enough (15 years or more) to produce roe.

Ten years ago, M. Williot's programme had an enormous breakthrough. A male and female fish, captured in the Gironde, bred in captivity, producing 9,000 tiny European sturgeon which were subsequently reintroduced to the ocean. Since then, he has had no further luck. It will be five more years before the surviving females from the "class of 1995" are mature enough to spawn themselves.

With some irony, it was the same scientific programme to rebuild the native European sturgeon stocks which discovered - by accident - that the Siberian freshwater sturgeon (Acipenser baerii) would willingly reproduce in captivity in the warmer climate of France. This discovery, in 1993, has been the basis of the revived French caviar industry. The triumph of this industry has, in turn, reduced the political will, and therefore the cash, for restoring the native fish.

The success of the French sturgeon farms is viewed with an ambivalent eye by one of France's great experts on sturgeon, René Val, now 86. He lives on the Rue du Caviar, next to the Quai de l'Esturgeon, in the village of Saint-Seurin-d'Uzet on the Gironde, which was for many years France's caviar capital. He was six or seven years old when he first saw a huge sturgeon being towed into the port behind a rowing boat.

M. Val has just published a book of memoirs and reflections, based on interviews by the author Bernard Mounier. ( René Val ou la Véritable Histoire du caviar de la Gironde, published by Bonne Anse, €20.) He says the local industry began in 1918 or 1919 when an exiled Russian princess watched in horror as a local fisherman threw the roe of a captured sturgeon back into the sea. She introduced the fisherman to the secrets of processing the roe into caviar and, for 30 years, the local industry thrived.

In 1925, M. Val recalls, a local boat captured a female sturgeon 15ft long, weighing 490kg, which yielded 70kg of caviar. A museum on the history of sturgeon fishing in south-west France opens in the summer.

Despite the scientific efforts to revive the native stocks, M. Val is pessimistic about the chances of rebuilding a wild caviar industry in the Gironde estuary. "They have baerii [Siberian] sturgeon in the fish farms here now and the baerii breed like battery chickens," he said, disdainfully.

M. Val's doubts are understandable but the French caviar industry has made important contributions to the unlocking the mysteries of the sturgeon.

Traditionally, to make caviar, sturgeon are killed to obtain their roe long before it is mature. In the system developed in France, those fish chosen to breed are left in the ponds until the eggs are ready for release. The mother fish is then given hormone injections and a miniature Caesarean. The eggs are removed without her being harmed and she returns to the pond.

Small fish go into separate-sex ponds, where they can put on up to one kilogram of weight a year. Ultrasound scanners check when the eggs are ready for caviar-making and the fish are "harvested". No way has yet been found of taking the immature eggs without killing a fish capable of living for a century.

Is French farmed caviar as good as wild Russian or Iranian Caspian caviar? "A few years ago, the idea of caviar from Aquitaine still had people chuckling," said Claudia Boucher from the company Sturgeon, which produces and markets French caviar. "Then the [French consumer magazine] 60 millions de consommateurs held a blind-tasting by experts in which the French caviar got the same score as Sevruga Russian caviar, which sells at double the price. That changed all the preconceptions."

Caspian caviar farms, using the local species, have yet to become as successful as the French farms. Chinese and American farms have had more luck with their own local species.

As the Caspian stocks plummet - damaged by over-fishing, poaching, pollution and the building of estuary dams - an urgent question arises. Will there be enough wild fish left to supply the small fish for the Caspian farms? Given the inflated price of caviar, experts are pessimistic about the chances of some sturgeon species surviving in the wild. Unless a reliable way is found of breeding them in captivity, the Caspian or European varieties of sturgeon may disappear after so many millennia of adaption and survival. The new fish farm technologies - and the high price of caviar - mean that other species will survive, preserved in captivity, in a kind of pre-Jurassic Park.

If you do eat caviar tonight, consider that with every mouthful, or blini smear, you are consuming hundreds of unborn examples of a species which has existed for 300 million years.