November 2, 2022 • 36 mins
Cacao hunter Volker Lehman has spent 20 years ruining his life to chase the perfect flavor. But he just can’t quit the Amazon.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
To get to Vulcan Lehman's compound in the Amazon kept
really want together there. For me, that involved a red
eye from Miami to Santa Cruz, Olivia's biggest city, then
a puddle jumper to a town called Trinidad, a sweaty
night there, and then nine grueling hours in a collectivo
taxi squeeze between farm hands and crying babies, hammering over
(00:37):
washboard rows at thirty miles per hour, which is about
twenty miles per hour too fast. At last, I got
dropped off at Vulkar's place. Hello. Hello, it's changed since
my visit twelve years ago. For our river trip. Folcus
built himself a crazy new house, all screen, no walls.
A few feet away, there's an out house with tree
(00:59):
frogs in the toilet, a workshop with a generator, and
a big greenhouse for fermenting cacao. There's papayetrees and bananas,
and a tiny white local chili called goose anita. It
looks like little worms. They're brutally hot. The vulgar munches
them like popcorn. Surrounding it all, of course, are the cocaudries,
acres of them. Poker calls the place tranquila DoD. It
(01:22):
means tranquility in Spanish, and most of the time the
name fits most of the time. So um, if you can,
you runt down all the things to watch out for.
I'm wandering around. I always tell the people when they come,
please don't touch anything. I think National Geographic and all
(01:44):
Animal planet they give a false perspective. There are people,
you know, gripping crocodiles and snakes and whatnot, and so
don't touch the crocodiles or the snakes. Is in general,
there's actually a lot of crocodiles, not a touch. The
place is filled with them. Technically, the ones in the
Amazon are called caymans, not crocodiles, but I know a
(02:07):
crocodile smile when I see one. The big ones in
Bolivia can be more than twelve ft long, and Folkers
says to stay away from them because they like to
charge people. But the smaller ones, well, he's caught a
five footer in honor of our reunion, and now he's
prepping it for dinner. We have like rips and tail.
(02:28):
The tail will eat raw with lime juice like svich.
The ribs get fried not too long, so it stays
juicy inside, its wanderful. When you're talking about wild chocolate.
This is ground zero. Tranquilidad is where the movement was born.
The beans from these trees produced the first run of
Cruise Savage and set off the gold rush to find
more last ca cow with wicked new flavors. I've come
(02:51):
to work the harvest, to learn the arts of picking
and fermenting, to understand on a deeper level, where great
chocolate comes from. The Last time I was here a
dozen years ago, the trip had gone from bad to absurd,
but it ended well. Volker lined up lots of new
sources of cacao. Cruise Evage was a hit, and Volker
(03:14):
became a legend in the fine chocolate community. And then
something went terribly wrong. I've only heard the details from
a distance, but just like those golden pods, were cursed. Yeah.
I had no intention to dig into this jungle. Actually,
(03:36):
I I fell into the trap. It was just looking
for some stupid kaka in the forest. I wasn't even
planning on this. Yeah, well you'll see what happened. For
(03:59):
thirty years, has been chasing that grail, always believing it
was one step away, always believing that with just a
little more organization, the Amazon would fall into place. And
of course he was just the latest in a long
line of outsiders to believe that he could make sense
of the chaos, from the Spanish gold hunters and the Jesuits,
(04:22):
to the rubber barons of the eight hundreds and they
explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in Still Seeking the Lost
City of z And to the characters in Werner Herzog's
Amazon films, and even Herzog himself, who seems to have
gone at least partially insane trying to make those movies.
What are your plans when this movie is all over?
(04:43):
What are you gonna be doing? I shouldn't make movies anymore.
Should go to a lunatic asylum right away. These dreamers
always think they're close, and every time the same thing
happens there, attempts to make it work on their terms fail.
(05:06):
From Kaleidoscope and I Heeart podcasts. This is Obsessions, Wild Chocolate.
I'm Roman Jacobson, Chapter two, Olivia for Dummies. Long before
(05:28):
he ever saw a cowpot, Volker Lehman was a little
boy in Berlin with a green thumb. His father was
an army veteran and a coal miner battling exhaustion and PTSD.
So he came from work and then he went for
one or two hours into the garden. Yeah, and that
helped him also to maybe forget a little about about
(05:49):
the harsh conditions in the coal mine. By the time
he was five, Folker was gardening right alongside him. I
had to pull out the weeds and well, sometimes I
missed and put on the carrots. Education, but he never
much liked the German climate. After high school, he took
(06:10):
a trip to Latin America and compared to the gray
horizons of post war Germany, it was like stepping into
a technicolor wonderland. I was intrigued by the climb, at
the music, the food. It's like you feel friendly. But
it wasn't just the culture around farming. Volka was amazed
by the power of tropical plants, the way they grew
so ferociously, and the incredible amount of food and medicine
(06:33):
they could produce. One he decided to devote his life
to them. He knocked around the tropics for a few
years doing development work, and by the nineties he'd found
his way to Bolivia. The German government had a program
to try to get Bolivia's farmers to switch from coca
to less controversial crops, and Vulgar's job was to teach
the farmers how to work with the new ones. Bolivians
(06:55):
consider coca their most sacred plant. The leaves are chewed
daily for stamina and stimulation, but they're also the source
of cocaine. And the ninety nineties Olivia was awash and
the stuff. Folker told me about those strange days as
we sat in his jungle home. No, but Santa Cruz
was like Carnival in real seven actually on Bolivia, and
(07:20):
Santa Cruz was the expansion project from the Colombians because
they needed more for you, you know that is you
being meat being America. They needed more cocaine to feed
our insatiable appetite, more than they could produce in Columbia, right, right,
So first they moved into Peru, and then that wasn't enough.
(07:44):
Then they moved over and to to Bolivia. People are
coming from Columbia by plane, small planes, bringing even their
bands with bringing the band. Yeah, yes, you heard that right.
If you're a Colombian drug hiller on the Bolivian range,
how do you party without your local tunes. There was
(08:09):
a small town, Santa Ananda, Yukuma, which was then the
hot spot. And did you ever have to worry about
crossing those guys? So sometimes you sit next to one
and he would not he would invite you. Oh you're American,
you know where you come from. He wants to know
where we are if you're not from d A right right,
And then he he puts a bottle of whiskey into you.
(08:29):
And then you start singing, you know, and and then
he he says, oh, this this guy is harmless. So
as Volker continued his work, he found himself caught between
his new friends, the farmers and the d e a.
Santa ana was known as a ranching town, but it
was also the heart of Olivia's cocaine network, because, as
it turned out, the ranchers and the traffickers could be
(08:51):
one and the same. Because when you have a farm,
when you have a farm here, you don't have a plane,
yeah normally and now to over watch anty hectares and
and you have to travel no roads. The natural thing
is to buy yourself as cessna. Then the pilot can
(09:12):
transport some some packages. You know what means, you know,
makes some side business, and of course that side business
turned out to be a lot more lucrative than cattle.
Soon Bolivia's ranchers were saddle deep in the drug business,
and everyone knew it. On the night of June, the
d e A took action. Dozens of helicopters carrying hundreds
(09:33):
of anti drug agents from Bolivia and the United States
swooped down on Santana. According to the d e A,
agents destroyed fifteen cocaine labs hidden in the little town
and confiscated dozens of planes along with hundreds of kilos
of coke. But they met stiff resistance from the townspeople,
who stormed the airport and surrounded the helicopters, chanting kill
(09:53):
the Yankees, leaving no uncertainty as to where their loyalties lay.
Vulgar tried hard to persuade farmers to switch crops, but
eventually he burned out bananas, pineapple, hearts of palm. None
of the alternative crops could ever compete with cocamine. He
felt useless, so he went back to his original obsession,
(10:15):
studying the local plants, and before long he was searching
the rainforest for the next big thing, a plant with
global appeal, Like a vegetal talent scout. He needed a
buzzy new client, and he found one. But it wasn't cocao,
not yet. It was brazil nuts, one of the great
treats of the Amazon. The territory of Bolivia was always
(10:37):
the main source of the main spot of the brazil nuts.
Always because Brazil chopped theres down or even before no,
it's yeah and um. The nuts were always sold through
Brazil and this is why they called brazil nuts. But
they always came from Bolivia. Bolivia nuts really yeah. Brazil
Nut trees are these giants of the rainforest, towering over
(10:59):
the rest of the canopy. They have these little coconuts
the size of bocci balls clinging to their trunks, and
each one is filled with delicious nuts. The trees are
kind of perfect for developing a rainforest economy, wild, sustainable, delicious,
but on their own they aren't exactly a big ticket item.
Bulker needed a sex air product, and he thought he
might have the perfect candidate, a lady from the Chimana tribe.
(11:23):
She showed me in the wild cacao. A few years earlier.
Bulker had been exploring the jungle for valuable new plants.
The natural people to ask where the Shimani, a group
of hunter gatherers who still lived off the wild, and
one old Shimani woman in particular, was known for her expertise.
That friend introduced me. Ah, he said, I I know
(11:44):
Chimana and they have some cacaw that might be of
your interest. Let's go, and not just any cacao, wild cacao,
something Vulka had never come across in his development work.
So they went to the forest and found the old woman.
She lived in intent made from sticks and palm thatch,
and she knew all the useful plants in the forest.
(12:04):
They still can see her, you know, she was really tiny.
They asked if she could show them the wild cocow
and she said sure, and she led them down a
footpath into the forest. So we were walking and I
was behind her sawing. I saw her hair like a nest,
and her hair was a little monkey. It was a
(12:27):
little pet monkey. And Falker could not stop looking at it.
There are tiny monkeys her right, and she got one,
and I was following her and looking at the monkey
all the time, and all of a sudden, she she
stopped and showed me a cow tree. And here it
(12:55):
is the argent moment of the man who's going to
make wild chocolate famous. In the Hollywood version of this tale,
the wise woman hands him the yellow pod and he
stares transfixed, like Indiana Jones gazing at the golden idol.
Here is the answer. He seeks, the thing that is
going to bring sustainable agriculture to the Amazon and transform
the world of chocolate. Does he break open the pod,
(13:18):
sniff the fragrant seeds, and hold it up like the
Holy Grail. I wasn't really interested in the tree much, really,
so oh, yeah, I see colcohol. Okay, Nope. All he
could think about was the monkey. And then my friend said, yeah,
do you think this is something? I said, I have
(13:39):
no idea, But he tucked the experience away in the
back of his mind, and when he was searching for
a sexy partner to inrobe his Brazilian nuts, he unpacked it.
And we will too after the break, Welcome back to
(14:13):
wild Chocolate. So we we put this Oh what oh
you call this? What's what's greater? Greater? Yeah? In La
Paz and Santa Cruz and the other cities of Bolivia.
You see rustic chocolate for sale in the markets, grainy
brown patties shaped my hand, just like he'saly in Mexico.
(14:36):
It's an old tradition in Bolivia, and they used stone
on stone blinders. Yeah, so that's how it's still done here.
This is the same, maybe fifty years ago. Amazing. But
if you bite into one of these patties by itself,
you're in for a bad time. Some of it tastes burnt,
some tastes like blue cheese, and it all crumbles like dirt.
(15:00):
For the locals, that doesn't really matter because it all
gets drunk. Is hot chocolate with enough sugar to cover
up any off flavors. For Vulcan, though, this chocolate wouldn't
cut it. There was no way he could cut his
precious brazil nuts and this stuff and pass it off
as a gourmet item. He needed better chocolate, but he
couldn't find any. He considered giving up on the whole idea,
(15:23):
but then he found a tiny, run down chocolate shop
in a back alley of Lapase. The proprietor was an
eighty five year old Jewish man who could escape the
Warsaw Ghetto during World War two. And he he was
like a very traditional chocolate lover and had a small
um choco factory. Jewish artisans have been at the heart
(15:47):
of Europ's chocolate making tradition since the days of the
Spanish court, and this old guy knew the traditional well.
When Vulgar tasted his chocolate, he could not believe his
daste buds. It was not terrible, but why Vulker put
the questions to him, and it turned out the guy
was doing what European chocolate makers have always done when
(16:08):
stuck with funky beans. They beat the warm coco mass
for hour after hour in a machine to blow off
as much of the off flavors as possible. It wasn't perfect,
but it was enough for Vulca to get his first
real sense of the beans behind the funk, and he
liked what he sensed. Behind the char and the cheese,
there was something beautiful at heart. Vulcan is an engineer.
(16:32):
When he sees a system, he thinks he's running poorly,
that could be so much better with just a few tweaks.
He can't resist. So now he couldn't help wonder if
the funk was built into the beans, or if there
was a way to get the beauty without the beast,
And there was only one way to answer that. He
had to go to the source, and that meant a
scruffy town called Trinidad, where everything the jungle produced, from
(16:55):
cocaw to cocaine could be found for sale. Tread is
Uh is the center of trade, and then people running
up and down the river with and and doing batta
batta business. Traders would spend weeks in the jungle and
then paddle into Trinidad to so other goods like the
rice and and everything you need because there's no there's
(17:18):
no money system. No, it was easier. It was easier
than you know. Give me, would give me bananas, give
me cocoa and and or whatever you have, and what
the market accepts then turn into money. Cacao is money basically.
So Volka flew to Trinidad. He started hanging out, getting
(17:41):
another locals asking questions, but how do you how do
you even do that? No, you just ask around. I
was talking to more elderly people because they were telling
me better the story. So I was sitting with them
having tea and chats. Yeah, and then a little by
little I got the picture. Most of the cacao was
(18:04):
coming from a town called Ballets. Barrets was truly at
the end of the earth, days from Trinidad by river,
but of course, like every other town in the Cocaine
So lowlands, it had an airstrip. So Volka hired a
plane and headed for it, never guessing how much his
life was about to change. There was no route, no electricity, nothing, no, no,
(18:28):
not even for nothing. We were talking on on on
shortwave radio. As he got to do the people in Bowrets,
the picture got even clearer. And that picture, well, he
almost had to pinch himself. The cocat was coming from
islands of high grounds scattered across the wetlands, natural terraces
(18:49):
that didn't get drowned during the four months rainy seasons.
The locals called these forest islands Chocolatales. It was always
harvested and used for local chocolate in Yeah, but on
a very very low price, and during the wet season
when the cacao was ripe, families would travel to the
chocolate tales by canoe. The journey alone could take days.
(19:12):
Then they camp in the forest for months, picking the pods,
opening them and drawing the beans on mats in the sun.
Then they'd sell the beans back in town, But the
tradition was dying in Bolivious cities. People were switching over
to powdered cocoa mix, which was easier to use. Prices
for the wild cacao were too low to justify the work.
The kids were less interested, so the people were starting
(19:35):
to give up on the yearly trips. Many of the
chocolate tallies had been abandoned, a few had been cut
down for cattle grazing. It didn't take long for Volker
to understand why the quality was bad. Two essential steps
to making great beans are pretty darn hard to do
in the Amazon. Drawing beans in the rainforest without a
shelter of any kind is impossible. Many of the beans
(19:55):
were moldy, and even the ones that weren't moldy had
very little chocolate flavor. Fresh cacao beans are naturally bitter
and a stringer. They have to be heaped together with
their sugary pulp for days and fermented to transform those
nasty flavors into chocolate ones. Unfortunately, most of the people
in the world harvest in cacao don't have the time, expertise,
(20:17):
or facilities to do it. Properly, and that was the
case in Bolivia, and that spoke to Vulcar's engineer Soul.
A little training and infrastructure, a micro dose of good
old German organization could make all the difference. All he
needed was to see just how much cacao was out
there and if it was at all feasible to improve
(20:37):
the fermenting and drying. But getting around the roadless jungle
was brutal. There were certain islands I wanted to go to,
so I had to find a horse and a guide.
Set on the horse. After two hours, I couldn't I
couldn't feel my legs anymore. And and after six hours
(20:58):
I couldn't feel anything anymore. You know, I was like
I was in full pain. Days on the range in
the sun, battling heat and bugs the horses they attract
also all kinds of flies that sting and suck your blood,
and so you're fighting with the horse together. You're no
(21:20):
not not to leave too much blood every day, you know,
when you're there, I were seeing all kinds of things
on the horizon from from the heat. What kind of
things do you say when you look at the horizon,
Then you see water? And then I saw all kinds
of animals, and there wasn't anything. But finally they made
(21:44):
it to the forest island and the shade of the
chocolate all we went forward with the machetta and in
the inner part it lifted up, and it was like
the trees were standing in a nice distance to each
other and in harmony somehow, at which point he was like,
fuck the brazil nuts. I want to make this cacao famous.
(22:07):
He wondered if he was staring at the greatest development
opportunity of his career. If the international market got excited
about wild cacao, the beans would command much more money,
the pickers could make a living, the tradition would survive,
and the chocolate tales could be preserved. He couldn't quite
see how the numbers were going to work, but he
knew it was an hour never. As Volker continued to
(22:29):
explore the region by foot, boat and horseback, he fell
under its spell. Vast wetlands with hundred mile views, lush
rain for us, more wildlife than he'd ever seen, McCaw's cappa,
bara's weaver birds, jaguars, and tons of cacao just waiting
to be properly fermented. And then came the moment that
(22:51):
whipped the trajectory of his life in a new and
unexpected direction. Somebody said, hey, there's a place on say
are you interested? Actually, it hit a long term wish
you not to by by peaceful land. Yeah, to have
(23:11):
my own farm maybe and in and maybe have a
succure place when the world goes to hell. You know,
well it didn't go to hell, but eventually it will tranquility.
After the break, I want to taste of some of
(23:52):
this god level chocolate we got you covered. Kaleidoscope has
joined forces with Louise Abram and Statler's Chocolate to make
a special box to go along with the very podcast.
Now you could sample of flavors from the banks of
the Amazon without having to fight off jaguars and Anagonda's.
Just visit www. Dot Stetler Dash Chocolate dot com to
order your Wild Chocolate today. Check the link in the
(24:13):
show notes. You're listening to Wild Chocolate. I think that's it.
That's yeah. We stopped because we can get lost. Bulker
and I are walking in tranquily Dot in the chocolate
(24:34):
hall he bought all those years ago. It's shady and
warm and still the ground is smooth with waxy leaves.
The trunks of the co cow trees are spaced evenly apart,
like the columns of some temple. There's one, two, three, four,
five or whatever. Yeah, amazing, Yeah, and spacing. It looks
(25:01):
like that somebody you know measured the spacing. You could
actually think about, Hey, somebody planted these trees. You know
they are in a room. No, it's just just a
natural pattern. So not planted, but maybe not entirely natural,
(25:22):
depending on how you define natural. Bulker has a theory.
I say there was a hunter and he had a
coco pot, and he was sucking on the beans, and
every ten steps he spit out the beans and sucks
a dam. And ten steps later and he sucked and
(25:42):
he spit out the dam. This is what you always
do when you walk through a chocolate holl You absolut
mindedly grab a pod, split it open, and scoop a
goopy handful of white palpon's ease into your mouth. Yeah,
as you walk, you suck the juice off the sea eats.
The flavor is sweet and tart, deliciously refreshing in the
(26:04):
heat of the jungle. Then you spit out the seeds
and grab another pod, and your walk gets a little
bit nicer. People have been making that beautiful sound for
ten thousand years, and wherever you hear it, a baby
cocou try is born. No bulker paid a visit to
(26:25):
the chocolates hall that was for sale. It was huge, magical.
He followed footpaths through the woods where generations of people
had picked cocao. He opened a pod and tasted the juice.
Monkeys chattered at him from the trees. The ground was
nice and high, unlikely to flood. He knew if he
(26:46):
didn't buy it, the next buyer would probably clear the forest.
And something tugged at him. So he came up with
ten thousand dollars and bought it on the spot. And
then it was time to test his theory of these
beans really make great chocolate. He picks some pods for
many of the beans as well as he knew how,
(27:06):
and made them into chocolate. It has almost no bitterness.
It's it has a sweetness um somehow between floral and
and dark dark of fruits and and it and it
goes back and forth. There's nothing really that compares the
(27:30):
the overall flavors and the spectrum of different flavors during
the time you have it in your mouth. There's nothing
you know that, there's nothing like this. The rest seemed simple.
He'd make the world's most beautiful beans and bring the
chocolate industry to Bolivia's doorstep. And you live right here.
(27:54):
And here's where things get a little bit cosmic. As
he cleared a patch of ground to build a house
out of the red earth, gave a clay pot, and
then another and another. They were beautiful, with fluted necks
and intricate etched patterns, and they were a thousand years old.
As Bulker kept digging, the treasures kept coming. One day
(28:17):
at tranquiladd he showed them to me. They saw, volunteer,
there's an X, two different xes. That's a beauty. Yeah,
they have strings attached, and then we're hanging. This is
actually a toy. It was a doll, probably for a
(28:40):
kid to play with. Amazing. The artifacts were the remnants
of an ancient settlement. Soon archaeologists visited. Chocolatelles were part
of a massive network of earthen platforms, terraces, pyramids, causeways
and canals. This network stretched across thousands of square aisles.
(29:01):
So this part of the Amazon wasn't just primorial wilderness.
It was the overgrown orchards and plazas and streets of
a sophisticated culture known as the Casarabe, and a thousand
years ago their civilization was hopping, probably a couple of
million people living here um pre Columbia. I think the
(29:23):
largest community of native people in the Amazon were in
this part of Olivia and Brazil. This may have been
the source of rumors about the lost city of z
The Casarabe civilization disappeared around the year four for unknown reasons,
(29:44):
but one thing we know about them is that they
loved cacao. The reason Tranquilidad and the other chocolate till
lives are filled with coco trees is because for hundreds
of years the people who lived there were eating cacao
and spitting out the seats. Some of the trees today
are the same tree as the Casarabe used. Jean Kiladad was,
in a sense a ghost island of ancient beings for
(30:12):
the entire ecosystem. It's it's a very very valuable tree.
It doesn't die, it survives droughts, flooding, and on top
of it brings us the foot of the gods. H
He set up the artifacts on a little altar in
the corner of his house, and he began thinking of
(30:34):
himself as just a small part of a larger story.
The place was talent. He basically, I see it not
as an owner. I see it as a piece of
land that nature gives it to me for a certain
certain amount of time. But I would leave it as
as fast as a cat. Vulker needed the partner with
(30:56):
a chocolate maker, so he began taking the beans to
trade shows. But every buyer he met looked at him
like he was crazy. I said, I have wild cocol
and they said, there's not such a thing. And I said,
there is wild coco in the Amazon. No, no coco
comes from Micador. Okay. And they were not alone, right,
(31:18):
I assume no that everybody. Everybody was ignorant. Everybody. He
finally got the attention of felsh Lean, a famous old
Swiss chocolate house. Felsh Len was competing with the top
French companies in the gourmet chocolate world, and it was
always on the hunt for something that would set it
apart from its rivals. The buyer asked for a sample
of the beans to test in their lab in Switzerland.
So Volcas sent off the beans right away, that thing
(31:40):
he'd been chasing for years. He could almost taste it.
But what if he was wrong? What if the beans
weren't a special at He thought, No on that point,
he drushed it himself and he was right. Soon felsh
Lean asked for another four d key Lows so they
could run some test batches on the big equipment. Oh yeah,
as he said, no problem, absolutely. Then he walked outside
(32:04):
and stared into his chocolates hall and wondered how the
hell he was going to do that. He spent two
sweaty months in the jungle, picking by hand. He worked
on the dusk until he personally harvested a ton of
fresh decao. Then he fermented it and dried it as
best he could and sent it to Switzerland. Then he
crossed his fingers and waited and waited, and finally the
(32:29):
call came, could he please come to Switzerland for a meeting.
So he cleaned himself up and crossed the Atlantic and
they were like, yeah, we want this. It was smooth
and rich and it's very distinct. And this is also
something fresh Lean told told me. The chocolate is clearly
(32:50):
distinct and this is what we are interested, don't know.
And then came the big question, how many talks and
and then I was like, um, I don't know. He
really didn't know. He had no clue how much he
could get his hands on and ferment properly but fecially,
(33:12):
and said, get us as much as you can. We
want it all. They had big plans for this Cacao.
They wanted to make a whole new bar, unlike any
that had been made before the world's first wild bar.
They already had a name for it, Crew Savage. That
bar was going to blow the staid world of chocolate
wide open, and it would take Vulgar Layman on a
(33:34):
wild ride. It would make him famous, but it would
also nearly destroy him. That's still to come. I'll always
remember something Vulgar said to me when he was recounting
the parade of dreamers who had marched into the Amazon
over the centuries seeking gold and glory. There's no Olivia
(33:57):
for dummies, he said, many people will have lost their
fortunes here. Well, he couldn't have known when he said
it was that he was going to be next. Look
on the phase of your wife saying there's no money.
What do you mean by there's no money? There was
the oldest money, yeah, but now there's no more money. Man.
You must have been furious at a lot of people. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(34:20):
yeah No with a gun in my hand that would
have killed some people. Maybe, yeah. Yeah. On the next
episode of Wild Chocolate, I could feel myself falling down
Mr rabbit Hole. Sometimes I talked about chocolate like music
(34:40):
and this was like you classic symphony orchestra, justst beautiful,
the Vatican of Chocolate. I got five fifty bars on
the shelf modeling. These young Italians show up and we've
heard all sorts of things that you know, somebody got
shot over this and d Wild Chock It is a
Kaleidoscope production with I Heart Podcasts, hosted and reported by
(35:03):
me Rowan Jacobson and produced by Shane McKeon at Nice
Mormaint Media, Edited by Kate Osborne and mangesh Hada Kudor,
Sound design and mixing by Soundboard. Original music composition by
Spencer Stevenson, a k. A. Botany production help from Baheeny
Shorty from My Heart. Our executive producers are Katrina Norvell
and Nikki Etor. Special thanks to Laura Mayor, Costaslinos Oswalash
(35:28):
and Aaron Coffman, Will Pearson, codel Burn, Bob Pittman, Daria
Daniel and the team at Stetler who are helping us
make a very special chocolate of our own. That's right,
We're working with Louisa at others to protect the rainforest
and make delicious Amazonian chocolate. Visit www dot Stetler dash
Chocolate dot com to taste it for yourself. That's www
(35:50):
dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com. And if you want
to hear more of this type of content, nothing is
more important to the creators here a Kaleidoscope than subscriber
ratings and reviews. Please spread the lave wherever you listen.
(36:16):
M
To get to Vulcan Lehman's compound in the Amazon kept
really want together there. For me, that involved a red
eye from Miami to Santa Cruz, Olivia's biggest city, then
a puddle jumper to a town called Trinidad, a sweaty
night there, and then nine grueling hours in a collectivo
taxi squeeze between farm hands and crying babies, hammering over
(00:37):
washboard rows at thirty miles per hour, which is about
twenty miles per hour too fast. At last, I got
dropped off at Vulkar's place. Hello. Hello, it's changed since
my visit twelve years ago. For our river trip. Folcus
built himself a crazy new house, all screen, no walls.
A few feet away, there's an out house with tree
(00:59):
frogs in the toilet, a workshop with a generator, and
a big greenhouse for fermenting cacao. There's papayetrees and bananas,
and a tiny white local chili called goose anita. It
looks like little worms. They're brutally hot. The vulgar munches
them like popcorn. Surrounding it all, of course, are the cocaudries,
acres of them. Poker calls the place tranquila DoD. It
(01:22):
means tranquility in Spanish, and most of the time the
name fits most of the time. So um, if you can,
you runt down all the things to watch out for.
I'm wandering around. I always tell the people when they come,
please don't touch anything. I think National Geographic and all
(01:44):
Animal planet they give a false perspective. There are people,
you know, gripping crocodiles and snakes and whatnot, and so
don't touch the crocodiles or the snakes. Is in general,
there's actually a lot of crocodiles, not a touch. The
place is filled with them. Technically, the ones in the
Amazon are called caymans, not crocodiles, but I know a
(02:07):
crocodile smile when I see one. The big ones in
Bolivia can be more than twelve ft long, and Folkers
says to stay away from them because they like to
charge people. But the smaller ones, well, he's caught a
five footer in honor of our reunion, and now he's
prepping it for dinner. We have like rips and tail.
(02:28):
The tail will eat raw with lime juice like svich.
The ribs get fried not too long, so it stays
juicy inside, its wanderful. When you're talking about wild chocolate.
This is ground zero. Tranquilidad is where the movement was born.
The beans from these trees produced the first run of
Cruise Savage and set off the gold rush to find
more last ca cow with wicked new flavors. I've come
(02:51):
to work the harvest, to learn the arts of picking
and fermenting, to understand on a deeper level, where great
chocolate comes from. The Last time I was here a
dozen years ago, the trip had gone from bad to absurd,
but it ended well. Volker lined up lots of new
sources of cacao. Cruise Evage was a hit, and Volker
(03:14):
became a legend in the fine chocolate community. And then
something went terribly wrong. I've only heard the details from
a distance, but just like those golden pods, were cursed. Yeah.
I had no intention to dig into this jungle. Actually,
(03:36):
I I fell into the trap. It was just looking
for some stupid kaka in the forest. I wasn't even
planning on this. Yeah, well you'll see what happened. For
(03:59):
thirty years, has been chasing that grail, always believing it
was one step away, always believing that with just a
little more organization, the Amazon would fall into place. And
of course he was just the latest in a long
line of outsiders to believe that he could make sense
of the chaos, from the Spanish gold hunters and the Jesuits,
(04:22):
to the rubber barons of the eight hundreds and they
explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in Still Seeking the Lost
City of z And to the characters in Werner Herzog's
Amazon films, and even Herzog himself, who seems to have
gone at least partially insane trying to make those movies.
What are your plans when this movie is all over?
(04:43):
What are you gonna be doing? I shouldn't make movies anymore.
Should go to a lunatic asylum right away. These dreamers
always think they're close, and every time the same thing
happens there, attempts to make it work on their terms fail.
(05:06):
From Kaleidoscope and I Heeart podcasts. This is Obsessions, Wild Chocolate.
I'm Roman Jacobson, Chapter two, Olivia for Dummies. Long before
(05:28):
he ever saw a cowpot, Volker Lehman was a little
boy in Berlin with a green thumb. His father was
an army veteran and a coal miner battling exhaustion and PTSD.
So he came from work and then he went for
one or two hours into the garden. Yeah, and that
helped him also to maybe forget a little about about
(05:49):
the harsh conditions in the coal mine. By the time
he was five, Folker was gardening right alongside him. I
had to pull out the weeds and well, sometimes I
missed and put on the carrots. Education, but he never
much liked the German climate. After high school, he took
(06:10):
a trip to Latin America and compared to the gray
horizons of post war Germany, it was like stepping into
a technicolor wonderland. I was intrigued by the climb, at
the music, the food. It's like you feel friendly. But
it wasn't just the culture around farming. Volka was amazed
by the power of tropical plants, the way they grew
so ferociously, and the incredible amount of food and medicine
(06:33):
they could produce. One he decided to devote his life
to them. He knocked around the tropics for a few
years doing development work, and by the nineties he'd found
his way to Bolivia. The German government had a program
to try to get Bolivia's farmers to switch from coca
to less controversial crops, and Vulgar's job was to teach
the farmers how to work with the new ones. Bolivians
(06:55):
consider coca their most sacred plant. The leaves are chewed
daily for stamina and stimulation, but they're also the source
of cocaine. And the ninety nineties Olivia was awash and
the stuff. Folker told me about those strange days as
we sat in his jungle home. No, but Santa Cruz
was like Carnival in real seven actually on Bolivia, and
(07:20):
Santa Cruz was the expansion project from the Colombians because
they needed more for you, you know that is you
being meat being America. They needed more cocaine to feed
our insatiable appetite, more than they could produce in Columbia, right, right,
So first they moved into Peru, and then that wasn't enough.
(07:44):
Then they moved over and to to Bolivia. People are
coming from Columbia by plane, small planes, bringing even their
bands with bringing the band. Yeah, yes, you heard that right.
If you're a Colombian drug hiller on the Bolivian range,
how do you party without your local tunes. There was
(08:09):
a small town, Santa Ananda, Yukuma, which was then the
hot spot. And did you ever have to worry about
crossing those guys? So sometimes you sit next to one
and he would not he would invite you. Oh you're American,
you know where you come from. He wants to know
where we are if you're not from d A right right,
And then he he puts a bottle of whiskey into you.
(08:29):
And then you start singing, you know, and and then
he he says, oh, this this guy is harmless. So
as Volker continued his work, he found himself caught between
his new friends, the farmers and the d e a.
Santa ana was known as a ranching town, but it
was also the heart of Olivia's cocaine network, because, as
it turned out, the ranchers and the traffickers could be
(08:51):
one and the same. Because when you have a farm,
when you have a farm here, you don't have a plane,
yeah normally and now to over watch anty hectares and
and you have to travel no roads. The natural thing
is to buy yourself as cessna. Then the pilot can
(09:12):
transport some some packages. You know what means, you know,
makes some side business, and of course that side business
turned out to be a lot more lucrative than cattle.
Soon Bolivia's ranchers were saddle deep in the drug business,
and everyone knew it. On the night of June, the
d e A took action. Dozens of helicopters carrying hundreds
(09:33):
of anti drug agents from Bolivia and the United States
swooped down on Santana. According to the d e A,
agents destroyed fifteen cocaine labs hidden in the little town
and confiscated dozens of planes along with hundreds of kilos
of coke. But they met stiff resistance from the townspeople,
who stormed the airport and surrounded the helicopters, chanting kill
(09:53):
the Yankees, leaving no uncertainty as to where their loyalties lay.
Vulgar tried hard to persuade farmers to switch crops, but
eventually he burned out bananas, pineapple, hearts of palm. None
of the alternative crops could ever compete with cocamine. He
felt useless, so he went back to his original obsession,
(10:15):
studying the local plants, and before long he was searching
the rainforest for the next big thing, a plant with
global appeal, Like a vegetal talent scout. He needed a
buzzy new client, and he found one. But it wasn't cocao,
not yet. It was brazil nuts, one of the great
treats of the Amazon. The territory of Bolivia was always
(10:37):
the main source of the main spot of the brazil nuts.
Always because Brazil chopped theres down or even before no,
it's yeah and um. The nuts were always sold through
Brazil and this is why they called brazil nuts. But
they always came from Bolivia. Bolivia nuts really yeah. Brazil
Nut trees are these giants of the rainforest, towering over
(10:59):
the rest of the canopy. They have these little coconuts
the size of bocci balls clinging to their trunks, and
each one is filled with delicious nuts. The trees are
kind of perfect for developing a rainforest economy, wild, sustainable, delicious,
but on their own they aren't exactly a big ticket item.
Bulker needed a sex air product, and he thought he
might have the perfect candidate, a lady from the Chimana tribe.
(11:23):
She showed me in the wild cacao. A few years earlier.
Bulker had been exploring the jungle for valuable new plants.
The natural people to ask where the Shimani, a group
of hunter gatherers who still lived off the wild, and
one old Shimani woman in particular, was known for her expertise.
That friend introduced me. Ah, he said, I I know
(11:44):
Chimana and they have some cacaw that might be of
your interest. Let's go, and not just any cacao, wild cacao,
something Vulka had never come across in his development work.
So they went to the forest and found the old woman.
She lived in intent made from sticks and palm thatch,
and she knew all the useful plants in the forest.
(12:04):
They still can see her, you know, she was really tiny.
They asked if she could show them the wild cocow
and she said sure, and she led them down a
footpath into the forest. So we were walking and I
was behind her sawing. I saw her hair like a nest,
and her hair was a little monkey. It was a
(12:27):
little pet monkey. And Falker could not stop looking at it.
There are tiny monkeys her right, and she got one,
and I was following her and looking at the monkey
all the time, and all of a sudden, she she
stopped and showed me a cow tree. And here it
(12:55):
is the argent moment of the man who's going to
make wild chocolate famous. In the Hollywood version of this tale,
the wise woman hands him the yellow pod and he
stares transfixed, like Indiana Jones gazing at the golden idol.
Here is the answer. He seeks, the thing that is
going to bring sustainable agriculture to the Amazon and transform
the world of chocolate. Does he break open the pod,
(13:18):
sniff the fragrant seeds, and hold it up like the
Holy Grail. I wasn't really interested in the tree much, really,
so oh, yeah, I see colcohol. Okay, Nope. All he
could think about was the monkey. And then my friend said, yeah,
do you think this is something? I said, I have
(13:39):
no idea, But he tucked the experience away in the
back of his mind, and when he was searching for
a sexy partner to inrobe his Brazilian nuts, he unpacked it.
And we will too after the break, Welcome back to
(14:13):
wild Chocolate. So we we put this Oh what oh
you call this? What's what's greater? Greater? Yeah? In La
Paz and Santa Cruz and the other cities of Bolivia.
You see rustic chocolate for sale in the markets, grainy
brown patties shaped my hand, just like he'saly in Mexico.
(14:36):
It's an old tradition in Bolivia, and they used stone
on stone blinders. Yeah, so that's how it's still done here.
This is the same, maybe fifty years ago. Amazing. But
if you bite into one of these patties by itself,
you're in for a bad time. Some of it tastes burnt,
some tastes like blue cheese, and it all crumbles like dirt.
(15:00):
For the locals, that doesn't really matter because it all
gets drunk. Is hot chocolate with enough sugar to cover
up any off flavors. For Vulcan, though, this chocolate wouldn't
cut it. There was no way he could cut his
precious brazil nuts and this stuff and pass it off
as a gourmet item. He needed better chocolate, but he
couldn't find any. He considered giving up on the whole idea,
(15:23):
but then he found a tiny, run down chocolate shop
in a back alley of Lapase. The proprietor was an
eighty five year old Jewish man who could escape the
Warsaw Ghetto during World War two. And he he was
like a very traditional chocolate lover and had a small
um choco factory. Jewish artisans have been at the heart
(15:47):
of Europ's chocolate making tradition since the days of the
Spanish court, and this old guy knew the traditional well.
When Vulgar tasted his chocolate, he could not believe his
daste buds. It was not terrible, but why Vulker put
the questions to him, and it turned out the guy
was doing what European chocolate makers have always done when
(16:08):
stuck with funky beans. They beat the warm coco mass
for hour after hour in a machine to blow off
as much of the off flavors as possible. It wasn't perfect,
but it was enough for Vulca to get his first
real sense of the beans behind the funk, and he
liked what he sensed. Behind the char and the cheese,
there was something beautiful at heart. Vulcan is an engineer.
(16:32):
When he sees a system, he thinks he's running poorly,
that could be so much better with just a few tweaks.
He can't resist. So now he couldn't help wonder if
the funk was built into the beans, or if there
was a way to get the beauty without the beast,
And there was only one way to answer that. He
had to go to the source, and that meant a
scruffy town called Trinidad, where everything the jungle produced, from
(16:55):
cocaw to cocaine could be found for sale. Tread is
Uh is the center of trade, and then people running
up and down the river with and and doing batta
batta business. Traders would spend weeks in the jungle and
then paddle into Trinidad to so other goods like the
rice and and everything you need because there's no there's
(17:18):
no money system. No, it was easier. It was easier
than you know. Give me, would give me bananas, give
me cocoa and and or whatever you have, and what
the market accepts then turn into money. Cacao is money basically.
So Volka flew to Trinidad. He started hanging out, getting
(17:41):
another locals asking questions, but how do you how do
you even do that? No, you just ask around. I
was talking to more elderly people because they were telling
me better the story. So I was sitting with them
having tea and chats. Yeah, and then a little by
little I got the picture. Most of the cacao was
(18:04):
coming from a town called Ballets. Barrets was truly at
the end of the earth, days from Trinidad by river,
but of course, like every other town in the Cocaine
So lowlands, it had an airstrip. So Volka hired a
plane and headed for it, never guessing how much his
life was about to change. There was no route, no electricity, nothing, no, no,
(18:28):
not even for nothing. We were talking on on on
shortwave radio. As he got to do the people in Bowrets,
the picture got even clearer. And that picture, well, he
almost had to pinch himself. The cocat was coming from
islands of high grounds scattered across the wetlands, natural terraces
(18:49):
that didn't get drowned during the four months rainy seasons.
The locals called these forest islands Chocolatales. It was always
harvested and used for local chocolate in Yeah, but on
a very very low price, and during the wet season
when the cacao was ripe, families would travel to the
chocolate tales by canoe. The journey alone could take days.
(19:12):
Then they camp in the forest for months, picking the pods,
opening them and drawing the beans on mats in the sun.
Then they'd sell the beans back in town, But the
tradition was dying in Bolivious cities. People were switching over
to powdered cocoa mix, which was easier to use. Prices
for the wild cacao were too low to justify the work.
The kids were less interested, so the people were starting
(19:35):
to give up on the yearly trips. Many of the
chocolate tallies had been abandoned, a few had been cut
down for cattle grazing. It didn't take long for Volker
to understand why the quality was bad. Two essential steps
to making great beans are pretty darn hard to do
in the Amazon. Drawing beans in the rainforest without a
shelter of any kind is impossible. Many of the beans
(19:55):
were moldy, and even the ones that weren't moldy had
very little chocolate flavor. Fresh cacao beans are naturally bitter
and a stringer. They have to be heaped together with
their sugary pulp for days and fermented to transform those
nasty flavors into chocolate ones. Unfortunately, most of the people
in the world harvest in cacao don't have the time, expertise,
(20:17):
or facilities to do it. Properly, and that was the
case in Bolivia, and that spoke to Vulcar's engineer Soul.
A little training and infrastructure, a micro dose of good
old German organization could make all the difference. All he
needed was to see just how much cacao was out
there and if it was at all feasible to improve
(20:37):
the fermenting and drying. But getting around the roadless jungle
was brutal. There were certain islands I wanted to go to,
so I had to find a horse and a guide.
Set on the horse. After two hours, I couldn't I
couldn't feel my legs anymore. And and after six hours
(20:58):
I couldn't feel anything anymore. You know, I was like
I was in full pain. Days on the range in
the sun, battling heat and bugs the horses they attract
also all kinds of flies that sting and suck your blood,
and so you're fighting with the horse together. You're no
(21:20):
not not to leave too much blood every day, you know,
when you're there, I were seeing all kinds of things
on the horizon from from the heat. What kind of
things do you say when you look at the horizon,
Then you see water? And then I saw all kinds
of animals, and there wasn't anything. But finally they made
(21:44):
it to the forest island and the shade of the
chocolate all we went forward with the machetta and in
the inner part it lifted up, and it was like
the trees were standing in a nice distance to each
other and in harmony somehow, at which point he was like,
fuck the brazil nuts. I want to make this cacao famous.
(22:07):
He wondered if he was staring at the greatest development
opportunity of his career. If the international market got excited
about wild cacao, the beans would command much more money,
the pickers could make a living, the tradition would survive,
and the chocolate tales could be preserved. He couldn't quite
see how the numbers were going to work, but he
knew it was an hour never. As Volker continued to
(22:29):
explore the region by foot, boat and horseback, he fell
under its spell. Vast wetlands with hundred mile views, lush
rain for us, more wildlife than he'd ever seen, McCaw's cappa,
bara's weaver birds, jaguars, and tons of cacao just waiting
to be properly fermented. And then came the moment that
(22:51):
whipped the trajectory of his life in a new and
unexpected direction. Somebody said, hey, there's a place on say
are you interested? Actually, it hit a long term wish
you not to by by peaceful land. Yeah, to have
(23:11):
my own farm maybe and in and maybe have a
succure place when the world goes to hell. You know,
well it didn't go to hell, but eventually it will tranquility.
After the break, I want to taste of some of
(23:52):
this god level chocolate we got you covered. Kaleidoscope has
joined forces with Louise Abram and Statler's Chocolate to make
a special box to go along with the very podcast.
Now you could sample of flavors from the banks of
the Amazon without having to fight off jaguars and Anagonda's.
Just visit www. Dot Stetler Dash Chocolate dot com to
order your Wild Chocolate today. Check the link in the
(24:13):
show notes. You're listening to Wild Chocolate. I think that's it.
That's yeah. We stopped because we can get lost. Bulker
and I are walking in tranquily Dot in the chocolate
(24:34):
hall he bought all those years ago. It's shady and
warm and still the ground is smooth with waxy leaves.
The trunks of the co cow trees are spaced evenly apart,
like the columns of some temple. There's one, two, three, four,
five or whatever. Yeah, amazing, Yeah, and spacing. It looks
(25:01):
like that somebody you know measured the spacing. You could
actually think about, Hey, somebody planted these trees. You know
they are in a room. No, it's just just a
natural pattern. So not planted, but maybe not entirely natural,
(25:22):
depending on how you define natural. Bulker has a theory.
I say there was a hunter and he had a
coco pot, and he was sucking on the beans, and
every ten steps he spit out the beans and sucks
a dam. And ten steps later and he sucked and
(25:42):
he spit out the dam. This is what you always
do when you walk through a chocolate holl You absolut
mindedly grab a pod, split it open, and scoop a
goopy handful of white palpon's ease into your mouth. Yeah,
as you walk, you suck the juice off the sea eats.
The flavor is sweet and tart, deliciously refreshing in the
(26:04):
heat of the jungle. Then you spit out the seeds
and grab another pod, and your walk gets a little
bit nicer. People have been making that beautiful sound for
ten thousand years, and wherever you hear it, a baby
cocou try is born. No bulker paid a visit to
(26:25):
the chocolates hall that was for sale. It was huge, magical.
He followed footpaths through the woods where generations of people
had picked cocao. He opened a pod and tasted the juice.
Monkeys chattered at him from the trees. The ground was
nice and high, unlikely to flood. He knew if he
(26:46):
didn't buy it, the next buyer would probably clear the forest.
And something tugged at him. So he came up with
ten thousand dollars and bought it on the spot. And
then it was time to test his theory of these
beans really make great chocolate. He picks some pods for
many of the beans as well as he knew how,
(27:06):
and made them into chocolate. It has almost no bitterness.
It's it has a sweetness um somehow between floral and
and dark dark of fruits and and it and it
goes back and forth. There's nothing really that compares the
(27:30):
the overall flavors and the spectrum of different flavors during
the time you have it in your mouth. There's nothing
you know that, there's nothing like this. The rest seemed simple.
He'd make the world's most beautiful beans and bring the
chocolate industry to Bolivia's doorstep. And you live right here.
(27:54):
And here's where things get a little bit cosmic. As
he cleared a patch of ground to build a house
out of the red earth, gave a clay pot, and
then another and another. They were beautiful, with fluted necks
and intricate etched patterns, and they were a thousand years old.
As Bulker kept digging, the treasures kept coming. One day
(28:17):
at tranquiladd he showed them to me. They saw, volunteer,
there's an X, two different xes. That's a beauty. Yeah,
they have strings attached, and then we're hanging. This is
actually a toy. It was a doll, probably for a
(28:40):
kid to play with. Amazing. The artifacts were the remnants
of an ancient settlement. Soon archaeologists visited. Chocolatelles were part
of a massive network of earthen platforms, terraces, pyramids, causeways
and canals. This network stretched across thousands of square aisles.
(29:01):
So this part of the Amazon wasn't just primorial wilderness.
It was the overgrown orchards and plazas and streets of
a sophisticated culture known as the Casarabe, and a thousand
years ago their civilization was hopping, probably a couple of
million people living here um pre Columbia. I think the
(29:23):
largest community of native people in the Amazon were in
this part of Olivia and Brazil. This may have been
the source of rumors about the lost city of z
The Casarabe civilization disappeared around the year four for unknown reasons,
(29:44):
but one thing we know about them is that they
loved cacao. The reason Tranquilidad and the other chocolate till
lives are filled with coco trees is because for hundreds
of years the people who lived there were eating cacao
and spitting out the seats. Some of the trees today
are the same tree as the Casarabe used. Jean Kiladad was,
in a sense a ghost island of ancient beings for
(30:12):
the entire ecosystem. It's it's a very very valuable tree.
It doesn't die, it survives droughts, flooding, and on top
of it brings us the foot of the gods. H
He set up the artifacts on a little altar in
the corner of his house, and he began thinking of
(30:34):
himself as just a small part of a larger story.
The place was talent. He basically, I see it not
as an owner. I see it as a piece of
land that nature gives it to me for a certain
certain amount of time. But I would leave it as
as fast as a cat. Vulker needed the partner with
(30:56):
a chocolate maker, so he began taking the beans to
trade shows. But every buyer he met looked at him
like he was crazy. I said, I have wild cocol
and they said, there's not such a thing. And I said,
there is wild coco in the Amazon. No, no coco
comes from Micador. Okay. And they were not alone, right,
(31:18):
I assume no that everybody. Everybody was ignorant. Everybody. He
finally got the attention of felsh Lean, a famous old
Swiss chocolate house. Felsh Len was competing with the top
French companies in the gourmet chocolate world, and it was
always on the hunt for something that would set it
apart from its rivals. The buyer asked for a sample
of the beans to test in their lab in Switzerland.
So Volcas sent off the beans right away, that thing
(31:40):
he'd been chasing for years. He could almost taste it.
But what if he was wrong? What if the beans
weren't a special at He thought, No on that point,
he drushed it himself and he was right. Soon felsh
Lean asked for another four d key Lows so they
could run some test batches on the big equipment. Oh yeah,
as he said, no problem, absolutely. Then he walked outside
(32:04):
and stared into his chocolates hall and wondered how the
hell he was going to do that. He spent two
sweaty months in the jungle, picking by hand. He worked
on the dusk until he personally harvested a ton of
fresh decao. Then he fermented it and dried it as
best he could and sent it to Switzerland. Then he
crossed his fingers and waited and waited, and finally the
(32:29):
call came, could he please come to Switzerland for a meeting.
So he cleaned himself up and crossed the Atlantic and
they were like, yeah, we want this. It was smooth
and rich and it's very distinct. And this is also
something fresh Lean told told me. The chocolate is clearly
(32:50):
distinct and this is what we are interested, don't know.
And then came the big question, how many talks and
and then I was like, um, I don't know. He
really didn't know. He had no clue how much he
could get his hands on and ferment properly but fecially,
(33:12):
and said, get us as much as you can. We
want it all. They had big plans for this Cacao.
They wanted to make a whole new bar, unlike any
that had been made before the world's first wild bar.
They already had a name for it, Crew Savage. That
bar was going to blow the staid world of chocolate
wide open, and it would take Vulgar Layman on a
(33:34):
wild ride. It would make him famous, but it would
also nearly destroy him. That's still to come. I'll always
remember something Vulgar said to me when he was recounting
the parade of dreamers who had marched into the Amazon
over the centuries seeking gold and glory. There's no Olivia
(33:57):
for dummies, he said, many people will have lost their
fortunes here. Well, he couldn't have known when he said
it was that he was going to be next. Look
on the phase of your wife saying there's no money.
What do you mean by there's no money? There was
the oldest money, yeah, but now there's no more money. Man.
You must have been furious at a lot of people. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(34:20):
yeah No with a gun in my hand that would
have killed some people. Maybe, yeah. Yeah. On the next
episode of Wild Chocolate, I could feel myself falling down
Mr rabbit Hole. Sometimes I talked about chocolate like music
(34:40):
and this was like you classic symphony orchestra, justst beautiful,
the Vatican of Chocolate. I got five fifty bars on
the shelf modeling. These young Italians show up and we've
heard all sorts of things that you know, somebody got
shot over this and d Wild Chock It is a
Kaleidoscope production with I Heart Podcasts, hosted and reported by
(35:03):
me Rowan Jacobson and produced by Shane McKeon at Nice
Mormaint Media, Edited by Kate Osborne and mangesh Hada Kudor,
Sound design and mixing by Soundboard. Original music composition by
Spencer Stevenson, a k. A. Botany production help from Baheeny
Shorty from My Heart. Our executive producers are Katrina Norvell
and Nikki Etor. Special thanks to Laura Mayor, Costaslinos Oswalash
(35:28):
and Aaron Coffman, Will Pearson, codel Burn, Bob Pittman, Daria
Daniel and the team at Stetler who are helping us
make a very special chocolate of our own. That's right,
We're working with Louisa at others to protect the rainforest
and make delicious Amazonian chocolate. Visit www dot Stetler dash
Chocolate dot com to taste it for yourself. That's www
(35:50):
dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com. And if you want
to hear more of this type of content, nothing is
more important to the creators here a Kaleidoscope than subscriber
ratings and reviews. Please spread the lave wherever you listen.
(36:16):
M
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