A stands for:

Refining or maturing? What’s the best term for caviar as it ages? It’s a dividing issue…

For Jean-Marie Pinçon, a member of the Club des Goûteurs de caviar, “caviar is not a cheese”, so there’s no such thing as maturing.

At Kaviari, we believe we can use both words. Indeed, caviar is a living product whose taste and texture evolve over time, like a wine or a cheese.

When caviar arrives in tins of origin (500g, 1kg or 1.8kg) at Kaviari, we place them in cold rooms. The long process of maturing or refining the caviar then begins. The salt is absorbed by osmosis: It’s this fusion that gives the grains their texture and taste. Caviar that is too fresh has no taste, and you need to wait at least 3 months from production for it to reveal its best aromas. Like a cellar master for wine or a master-ripener for cheese, Bruno, our master in caviar, monitors the proper aging of caviar until they have reached full maturity.

It’s a long process of learning and expertise, a know-how that has become rare. Our master is thoroughly familiar with each caviar, each variety and the way it improves. What’s more, we now observe that the same variety of farmed caviar “ages” differently depending on where the species was farmed: Ossetra caviar from Italy will not mature in the same way as ossetra caviar from Bulgaria. With farmed caviars, a notion of terroir is emerging. The environment and the way a sturgeon is raised differ from one aquaculture farm to another, just as vineyards within the same denomination area produce a distinct wine depending on the methods of cultivation and vinification.