François Beaumont-Garnier

Gastronomy Correspondent · April 15, 2026 · 7 min read

In 1998, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species suspended commercial trade in Caspian beluga caviar. The species — the largest freshwater fish in the world, capable of living 100 years and growing to 6 meters — had been so overfished that populations had collapsed by more than 90 percent since the Soviet era. The suspension was supposed to be temporary. It has never been lifted.

What replaced it, gradually and then suddenly, was aquaculture. Sturgeon farming — breeding the fish in controlled freshwater environments, harvesting the roe without killing the animal using a technique called "stripping" — began in earnest in the 1990s in Germany, Italy, and China. By the 2010s, farmed caviar had become sophisticated enough to challenge the memory, if not the mythology, of wild Caspian roe.

The finest farmed caviars now come from unexpected places. Caviar de Neuvic, produced in Aquitaine, has developed a culinary following among chefs who prize its relatively clean, oceanic flavor. White Sturgeon caviar from northern California — the Petrossian Imperial Selection — is served at Noma alumni restaurants across Scandinavia. China, incongruously, now produces approximately 60 percent of the world's caviar by volume.

The taste difference between farmed and wild roe is real but has narrowed considerably as husbandry techniques improve. More significant is the narrative difference. Wild caviar was extraction: a resource taken from an ecosystem until it was gone. Farmed caviar is, at its best, stewardship: animals kept in pristine river water, fed controlled diets, harvested and released and harvested again over a 12-year production cycle.

The result is a luxury that, for once, does not require you to look away from its origins. Whether that makes it more or less pleasurable depends, perhaps, on what you were looking for in the first place.