Peter Rebeiz deals in what he calls the cocaine of food. “You can just about get a million dollars’ worth into a fridge at home,” he confides, “and then, with almost no overheads, tout it around local restaurants”. With less than 100 tonnes of this culinary narcotic produced worldwide each year, you could easily get around €6,000 a kilo.

But while a spike in sales is usual around Christmas and New Year, these recessionary times are tough for purveyors of this black gold — the smooth, salty eggs of the sturgeon, better known as caviar. Long gone are the days when Rebeiz took an order for 100kg from a couple who, for some reason, wanted to take a bath in the stuff. “You have to wonder whether consumers, having not had caviar for a year or two, might decide it is something they can live without,” he muses.

At the same time caviar is also becoming a signature dish on the environmental menu. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), has imposed a moratorium on sturgeon being caught in the Caspian Sea, provider of 90% of world supplies. Wild sturgeon can live up to 80 years, grow to 4.5m and, as a species, pre-dates the dinosaurs. Yet, according to the WWF, overfishing has seen the catch decline by 96% in the last 20 years, while the Iranian fisheries ministry predicts that, thanks also to poaching, Caspian Sea sturgeon will be extinct by 2025.

And yet Rebeiz is sitting pretty. His caviar importing business was started by his father in Copenhagen in 1950. But in 2003 he realised that to alleviate pressure on Caspian Sea stocks, and to control quality levels — “you don’t find much flexibility working with agricultural export companies in Moscow or Tehran,” he dryly notes — another route was needed. Teaming up with Pierre Bergé, the French industrialist and co-founder of the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house, Rebeiz launched a sturgeon farming operation in Bordeaux, using a similar sturgeon species to that found in the Caspian Sea.

Geneva-based Caviar House & Prunier has since capitalised on a threefold strength: control of supply, control of production — and with it an environmental standpoint — and, uniquely among caviar producers, a retail front. There are some 50 outlets, encompassing stores, sea food bars and restaurants; there’s even one in Moscow, making Caviar House & Prunier the first foreign company to sell caviar back to the Russians.

“It has proven very important for us to be a brand and a retailer; it’s given us direct contact with the consumer,” says Rebeiz, who was marketing-savvy enough to launch an Yves Saint Laurent-designed tin. “That has given us a much better understanding of the market”.

And that market — the world’s richest countries, including EU states, the US, Japan and Switzerland account for 95% of sales — is slowly coming round to Rebeiz’s way of thinking. Many consumers have been locked into believing that wild caviar is qualitatively better than farmed, a situation not helped by unscrupulous producers selling farmed caviar as wild.

“And there is still a snobbery about it, though if you put an unmarked tin of each in front of such consumers they can’t tell the difference,” says Rebeiz. “It’s the same problem for producers of any luxury food stuff, be it salmon, oysters, wine: there is a lack of knowledge that is abused. Some people will buy anything in a Russian-looking tin. When customers demand Beluga eggs the size of olives, we send them to the pizzeria. But the public is coming round to the idea that farmed caviar can be of a high quality.”

It may not be the same as wild caviar in terms of size or colour but it is more than a match in flavour; a genuinely viable alternative, unlike that say, between wild and farmed salmon, an acute difference which has warped some expectations. Certainly, while a decade ago sturgeon farming had a poor reputation, that is changing too, such that aquaculture is becoming an increasingly popular business model in Spain, California, Uruguay and China. Even the Iranian government now offering interest-free lending and expertise to investors ready to open sturgeon farms in Iran’s waters.

Last month the industry convened in China to discuss future farming techniques; Caviar House & Prunier’s are already high-tech. As it takes, Rebeiz notes, “eight years to produce 1kg of caviar, eight months to get caviar from the fish and about about eight seconds to eat a tin of it”, much is being done to both maximise efficiency and improve conditions for the farmed sturgeon, including giving them sufficient swimming space, maintaining water cleanliness and managing possible contamination of nearby water courses. The company has also introduced ultrasound scanners, similar to those used to monitor human pregnancy, to better assess both the fi sh’s health and the ideal time for harvesting — previous methods involved needles and stressed the fish, increasing egg acidity and impairing flavour.

“We do have a tendency to humanise the fish,” admits Rebeiz. “We talk about them being in a good mood. And it sounds silly but after eight years there is an attachment to the fish among those that work with them. There are 150,000 fish so we don’t name them all, but we’re concerned that they have as natural a life as possible.”

The next step may be the application of still-experimental techniques for the surgical removal of roe from living sturgeon, without damaging the eggs, allowing the fish to live on and produce more. “It’s easily done with salmon but 80% of the sturgeon by volume comprises eggs so to successfully operate invasively is difficult,” says Rebeiz. “Any advance is slow; what we do now we won’t know the results of for eight years. Perhaps the bigger question is whether Caspian Sea species can be farmed at sea. I think it’s feasible and we’re looking into it.”

That, indeed, would represent the ideal, because alleviation on Caspian Sea stocks that the likes of Caviar House & Prunier’s advanced farming brings today may still not save wild sturgeon. Ironically perhaps, a growth of farming sturgeon to compete with wild sturgeon fishing in the Caspian Sea may take away any incentive to dredge rivers and keep waters as clean as CITES says the wild variety needs.