The world’s best (and currently most a la mode) caviar isn’t beluga and isn’t from Russia. It’s actually from La Rochelle in France, discovers Heidi Fuller-love.

The world’s sexiest black pearls might seem ideally suited to the legendary lustful temperament of the French. But mention Gallic caviar – even in France – and you’re more likely to win mystified looks, than invitations to try some. Readily linked with Russia and Iran, only caviar’s real connoisseurs know that French fishermen have been netting sturgeon in the silted Gironde estuary for centuries.

Not that the black stuff was an instant hit – when King Louis XV took his first mouthful back in 1750, he spat it out with a roar of disgust. Legend has it that it wasn’t until Princess Anastasia Romanoff, on the run from the Bolsheviks, arrived in Saint-Seurin d’Uzet sometime in the 1920s, that the reign of French caviar really began. According to local myth, the royal Rusky was devastated to see fishermen eating sturgeon with chips, so she whipped out a tortoiseshell spoon and made them try that precious roe. They must have liked it because they were soon producing five tonnes a year, earning this backwater port the title of France’s caviar capital.

Unfortunately, the smooth-skinned sturgeon, which has been around for the past 250 million years, was no match for the over-fishing that followed. By the 1990s, the Gironde sturgeon was almost extinct and French caviar seemed set to become a glamorous legend. It was then that knight in shining armour Alan Jones, a marine biologist from Leicester, arrived on the scene. Lance in hand, he approached French banks with his innovative project. “I want to revive the region’s caviar tradition by starting a business to farm sturgeon,” he told them. “Tu es fou ou quoi mec? ” (“You must be off your rocker, mate”), they replied. So Jones joined forces with French businessman Jean Boucher and in 1995 the pair used personal funds to buy a disused fish hatchery.

Fast forward a decade, and you’ll find me driving from La Rochelle airport in a Hertz hire car, past a blur of dune-fringed coastline studded with carrelets – jetties fitted with square fishing nets that look like something out of War of the Worlds. Arriving at Jones’s fish farm, near St Seurin, I find the sexagenarian p to his knees in a greenish pond, frothing with shark-like fins. “I’m doing biopsies on the female sturgeon to see if the roe is ready for harvest,” he says. “It’s a race against time because the eggs become rapidly mature and we only harvest unripe roe for fresh caviar.”

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