Insights: Indulgences

Matt Kramer
Published in: April 1, 2000

Published March/April 2000

INDULGENCES Gems of the Ocean The biggest and Best pearls are found off of australia's northwest coast by Matt Kramer If you want the biggest of something, there's usually only one place to go. So, when I decided to look for the biggest pearls in the world, I went to the Indian Ocean. Broome, Australia, to be exact.   Broome is to big pearls what Kenya is to big game. To get there, you first make your way to Sydney, on Australia's east coast. Then you fly cross-continent for five hours to Perth. Then you get on another plane and fly an additional 1,042 miles to Broome, in the northwest corner of the continent. The pearl farms are only a few more hours' drive away.   But why all this for pearls, even if they are the biggest pearls in the world? It's not rational. But then, neither is the pursuit of great Burgundy or climbing some forbidding peak. A pearl--a good one, anyway--is nature's most perfect creation. And a really big one is more extraordinary yet.   Unlike diamonds or any other gem, pearls are immaculately conceived. They emerge, luminescent, from the sea. Nothing gets done to them. They are the real Venuses on the half-shell. Every woman I know senses this. I've never met a woman who didn't like pearls.   "Well, we do gently polish pearls," concedes Rosario Autore of Pearlautore International, a Sydney-based firm, which handles about 30 percent of Australia's pearl production. I stop to see him before making my way to far-off Broome. His company represents seven of Western Australia's 11 government-licensed pearl farmers, selling their pearls to wholesalers.   "Pearls really do emerge just as you see them," says Autore. "We polish them ever so slightly, really just removing sea salts and organic matter. That's it. After that, we grade them by color, size, luster, shape and surface blemishes."   Once a year his pearl farmers harvest their carefully tended "crop." They come up with all sorts of pearls: big ones, small ones, pearly white or silvery or golden. They come in basically every color but black. Black pearls are found only in Tahiti, which has a species of oyster that imparts a black hue.   I arrive at Pearlautore while Autore's staff is sorting through the year's harvest. Under tight security, pearl graders sit near natural light and carefully examine individual pearls in hundreds of small plastic bags, kept separate by pearl farm. Oddly, no one is using a jeweler's loupe. "There's no need," says Autore. "Unlike other gems, everything you need to know about a pearl you can see with the naked eye."   I ask if he has some strands I could look at. It's one thing to see a single fine pearl. But it's another to see a finely matched strand. It's also a measure of money. Value multiplies exponentially with a matched strand.   Roundness is a consideration. Even though every bead inserted into the oyster is perfectly spherical, "only 25 percent of pearls are really round," says Autore. "What's more, only 5 percent of all pearls are what we call 'gem grade.' Those are the really perfect ones, with no blemishes, superb luster and ideal roundness." Put them together in a strand and, you've got a new definition of value added.   We walk into another room in which multiple trays are filled with strands. These are necklaces so big they could weigh down Audrey Hepburn. A nice-sized "standard" pearl, the sort you and I might see, is typically seven to eight millimeters in diameter, about the size of a large pea; most of them come from Japan. Australian pearls start at 10 millimeters. These particular pearls were 14 to 19 millimeters, about the size of a jawbreaker.   The best pearls have an incredible luster. They glow. The giveaway to top luster is that you can see--with white pearls anyway--what looks like a shiny steel ball in the center. It's an illusion, but that's what it looks like.   "This is my best strand," Autore says, modestly. "It took me seven years to put it together. It has 27 pearls between 15 millimeters and 19 millimeters. Every year I would replace a pearl with a more perfect one. But now I think it's finished."   I ask him how much it would sell for. "Well, depending on the retailer's markup, it will sell for between $1.5 to $1.8 million dollars--American." I put it back in the tray as if I am returning a newborn to its mother. "Don't worry, they're not that delicate, you know," he says with a laugh.   On the flight to Perth, that strand of pearls stays in my head like the afterimage you get when you look into a lightbulb for too long. Upon landing, though, other thoughts take over. Like the heat. Broome is tropical. It's Indian Ocean country, with a sea so aquamarine it looks fake.   The next morning at 6, Beverley Kinney zooms up to the hotel in her late-model Toyota Landcruiser. Part Aborigine, Chinese and English, the attractive, 50-something Kinney runs Blue Seas Pearl Farm, which she started 20 years ago with her late husband.   "Let's go," she says. And she's not kidding. After a fast, three-hour drive north along a dirt road, we stop at a competing pearl farm, the Arrow Pearling Co. They're working the day I arrive (Kinney's crew is off for the week), so we climb into Arrow's huge amphibious vehicle purchased from military surplus and drive into the ocean where we meet a proper boat. It takes us to the seagoing pearl farmers who are performing the pearl-farming equivalent of weeding the patch.   The oyster shells are collected by hand from the ocean floor. That's where the divers come in. Big pearls come from big oyster shells, and that's why Kinney and her colleagues are located here. The tides in this northwest corner of Australia are gargantuan, typically about 33 feet. (Canada's Bay of Fundy still has the record, though, with tides surpassing 48 feet.) That washes in an awful lot of food for the oysters to grow on.   The oyster involved is a species called Pinctada maxima, which is the world's largest oyster. Shells can be the size of dinner plates. When pearl cultivation came to Australia in 1958, these huge shells were the reason.   Naturally occurring pearls are exceedingly rare, a chance moment when a piece of grit gets inside an oyster in just the right place. These pearls are never round and are rarely big, and maybe one in 10,000 shells actually has one inside.   Kokichi Mikimoto changed that. In the early 1900s, building upon the work of two other Japanese, Mikimoto formulated a way to mass-produce cultured pearls. But instead of using silver or gold beads for the nucleus, which is inserted into the oyster to create the pearl, Mikimoto experimented with a variety of substances. The oysters rejected every seeding material you can imagine: wood, metal, glass, even soap. Nothing worked until Mikimoto chanced on using spherical beads made from, of all things, freshwater mussel shells from the Mississippi River! To this day, that's what is used.   Then there's the delicate matter of finding just the right spot to insert the bead. This takes no little skill and only recently did the Japanese trade secret of how to do it finally fall into non-Japanese hands.   Today, of course, the Mikimoto company is world-famous for selling superb pearls. But the larger pearl industry in Japan is under a little-reported cloud. The once-pristine Japanese waters where oysters have long been cultivated are now polluted. Business pressures have many, if not most, oyster farmers removing the pearls from their oysters after only six months; the ideal nurturing time is three years. As a result, the nacre coating of many Japanese pearls is very thin.   Understandably, the Japanese producers prefer not to dwell on this. And the Australians, whose pearls--regardless of size--spend two years acquiring a thick nacre, know they've got something special. But they're reluctant to make a marketing issue of it. You see, the Japanese control the world pearl business. Wholesale pearl prices are always quoted in yen, for example. And Japan is a big pearl market in its own right.   I talk about this and more with Kinney after we leave Arrow Pearling and arrive, an hour later, at Blue Seas Pearl Farm at Deepwater Point. We have the place almost to ourselves.   Deepwater Point is a peninsula that juts into King's Sound, near the Indian Ocean, far away from anything except wildlife. Kinney, who also owns a clothing store in Broome, has fashioned a life for herself that's an odd combination of sea spray and sophistication. "I've got a big crew of men working for me," she says. "And sometimes I miss--what would you call it?--the chance to be sentimental. You can't be in this business. There's too much risk, too much chance, too much hard work."   As we talk pearls and the pearl business, Kinney is discreet, but unrelentingly proud, too. Australian pearls really are better, even if the Aussie producers are diplomatically reluctant to say so.   I can't help noting that Kinney isn't wearing any pearls. Does she ever? "Oh, I owned some once," she says, laughing. "One of my daughters took them, I think. Now, it just doesn't occur to me. Besides," she adds, her arm taking in the vast, beautiful and almost shockingly isolated seascape surrounding her house at the tip of the peninsula, "Who's going to see them out here?"   Matt Kramer is a columnist for Wine Spectator magazine, Cigar Aficionado's sister publication.

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