Farm-Fresh Eggs

"The trouble always is," explains James Bond to his female companion, "not how to get enough caviar, but how to get enough toast with it." That might have been true in 1953, when 007 was getting his first outing in the novel Casino Royale. Today the reverse is true: toast may be plentiful, but caviar, at least the kind Bond ordered for dinner, is in crisis.

The sturgeon has been around for a couple of hundred million years, and over time this fish and its roe—which, when brought into contact with salt, becomes caviar—have caught the attention of everyone from Aristotle to Peter the Great to Ian Fleming. But this year there has been no caviar from the Caspian Sea, at least no legal caviar.

Poaching, pollution, and overfishing have caused once plentiful stocks to dwindle to levels that have caught the attention of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. This year the shortage is especially severe, thanks to an administrative cock-up. For CITES to agree to caviar quotas, all the producing countries around the Caspian have to meet, and, according to Peter Rebeiz, CEO of Caviar House & Prunier, the Kazakhstan delegate missed the meeting.

Nevertheless, Rebeiz remains sanguine. That's because he has 160,000 sturgeon sitting in a series of pools in Bordeaux. Any day now, the first of his autumn crop of farmed caviar will be available in stores.

The rising status of farmed caviar is the biggest thing to happen to the international caviar market since 1957, when the Shah of Iran decided that he would make his own rather than sell his country's sturgeon to the Russians. So strong was the image of Russian caviar that "it took about 20 years before Iran got a foothold," says Rebeiz.

Now the process of reeducating the consumer is starting again, with gourmets being told that the farmed stuff is of a consistently higher quality. The absence of any caviar from the Caspian this year has given farmed caviar a clear run.

Few foods are as evocative as caviar. Along with Rolls-Royces, top hats, and champagne, it is an essential accessory of the pantomime plutocrat—shorthand for a life of sybaritic indulgence. There are three basic types: sevruga, made with the smallest eggs; osetra, the middle tier in terms of size and price; and beluga, the king of caviar, shiny anthracite beads that can command prices of more than $16,000 per kilo.