CNN
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When Delphyne Dabezies first announced her plans to launch Africa’s first caviar manufacturer, some in the luxury food industry were incredulous.
But now, 15 years since founding her company, Acipenser, with its Rova and Kasnodar Caviar brands, Dabezies’ products have made their way into some of the most prestigious kitchens in the world.
High in the mountains of Madagascar, just east of the capital Antananarivo, Lake Mantasoa has emerged as an unlikely source of this opulent ingredient. “Every expert was saying it was impossible,” Dabezies told CNN.
The history and luxury of caviar
Caviar is a delicacy made from the salted eggs of sturgeon fish. Traditionally sourced from Russia’s Caspian Sea, it gained luxury status in the 17th century after Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich I made caviar a state monopoly.
Production soon spread around the world. With the establishment of Acipenser in Madagascar, caviar is now produced on every inhabited continent other than Australia.
Due both to its cultural significance and the long maturation period of sturgeon fish – between eight and 20 years – caviar can fetch prices as high as $27,000 a teaspoon.
And then there is the coveted taste. “You just sort of press it against your palate,” Nichola Fletcher, author of “Caviar: A Global History,” told CNN, “and the little eggs dissolve into deliciousness.”
Inspired by a television program on sturgeon farming in France, French trio Dabezies, her husband Christophe, and their friend Alexandre Guerrier, decided to pursue a similar project in their adopted home of Madagascar, where they were already working in the textile trade.
Dabezies said they began “without any knowledge” of caviar production.
“Nobody in the beginning though it was possible, and nobody wanted to help us,” Dabezies said. It took the arrival of a retired sturgeon farming expert Francoise Rennes, on vacation in Madagascar, to help them get their project of the ground. And then one day, driving to their weekend house, they saw the lake.
Lake Mantasoa is situated at an altitude of approximately 1,400 meters (4,590 feet) in the Madagascan highlands, a temperate zone atypical for the tropics. It turned out to be “absolutely the perfect environment to grow the sturgeon,” said Dabezies. Unlike in the Northern Hemisphere where low water temperatures can cause the fish to stop growing, Lake Mantasoa ranges between 13 and 23 degrees Celsius, allowing the fish to grow year-round. Consequently, Dabezies’s fish mature around two years faster.
Soon, the dream of three novice sturgeon farmers became a reality. Today, their caviar production comprises both land and lake-based ponds in Madagasca