November 9, 2022 • 36 mins
No one should be murdered over some cacao beans. But as the world gets a taste for wild chocolate, competition becomes cutthroat.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
I'm walking down eighteen Street by six a past the
Metro pavilion, and I see this line outside and I'm saying,
what are you guys doing? And they're saying, um, we're
going to the chocolate show. I was like the chocolate show.
(00:34):
That's Mark Christian, chocolate historian, critic, and philosopher. I didn't
get a pH d or anything like that. I gotta
tell you I had earned a c h d. Chocolate Doctor,
Doctor of Chocolate without a doubt, without a doubt. Dr
Chocolate is such a legend that a rave review from
him can propel a new bar to fame and fortune.
(00:54):
But back in the early few thousands, gourmet chocolate wasn't
on his radar. I get in there and I'm walking around.
I instantly I caught on that, you know what, this
is the same crowd as in Amsterdam the Cannabis. The
room was vibing almost the same, and they were such
a captive, passionate group. At the time, Mark was managing
(01:16):
events around the world, including the Cannabis Cup. Now I'm
a non user, but my business partner is more than
a user. He's waking, bake and you know, and shake
the flake all day long, and as he poked around,
his Spidey sense told him that maybe he found the
next big recreational substance. I had an encounter with a
(01:39):
gentleman named Alessio Testier. He with his sister owned a
company called Ama Day. And this guy was speaking in
such you know, classic high falutint terms of this legacy
and lore of chocolate. And he's dressed in this Armandi
suit that's just you know, cut to the max. And
(02:00):
right away might BS detector went off, you know, do
you know it's sort of like, don't bullshit the bullshitter. Okay,
what are you doing? But he said no, no, no,
you don't understand. He's telling me about how he has
this exclusive deal with this place called chew Wow, the
women who was primarily a woman led cooperative. They would
sun and dry the beans on the plaza of the church,
(02:23):
you know, every season, and son there only seven acres.
And he went on and on and on and on,
and I was just saying, come on, chocolate is what's
Halloween candy? What are you talking about? So Alessio gave
markat Chuil Bar to try. It was massive. You know,
Chewa is heavy on the bell. It's big. It's the
(02:44):
blueberry pie of chocolate. It's got massive blueberry appeal. Chua
was considered the greatest chocolate on earth at that time,
and Alessio Tessiery had stolen it. He had tiptoed into
the den of Valona, the French kingpin of gourmet chocolate,
which once held exclusive control over the supply, and pride
(03:05):
it right out of their hands. Alessia was the bad
boy of chocolate, the Alfante rib the young Italian who
refused to play by the French rules, and he wasn't
bullshitting the bullshitter. There really was only a tiny supply
of Chiuao beans coming from a single isolated valley on
the mountainous Venezuela coast, and it really was dried by
(03:27):
a hand by the women of Chuao on the town's
church plaza. And those three factors, the beans, the place,
and the care they set it apart. For years, Valarona
had enjoyed a lock on Chuao and on the world,
especially chocolate. It was the most famous company and Chuaw
was its most coveted bar. But it never paid that
(03:47):
much of a premium to the Chuow Cooperative for those beans,
because back then nobody paid more for beans just because
they tasted good. Cocat wasn't wine. It was treated more
like corn, a commodity, but changed the day Alessia Tessieri
stole you all away. What Alessio understood was that there
(04:10):
was a world of people who thought of chocolate like wine,
and they were willing to pay a lot for a
great experience, and that meant great cacaws like Chuaw were
worth way more than any of the chocolate companies realized.
And as everyone else in the chocolate business figured that out,
all eyes fell in Latin America, Cocao's birthplace. If there
were more choos out there, villages harboring beautiful old varieties
(04:33):
from cocao's pre industrial golden era, that's where they'd be.
The great cacao gold Rush was on. It was almost
a search of gold, but actually hit the cacaw is
the gold, and eventually it was going to lead to
right from Volka Lehman's Olivian doorstack and make him wonder
(04:54):
why he ever got sucked in in the first place.
Sometimes I think all all days for Damn bar On.
Talking from Glidys Delvin i Heeart podcasts, this is obsessions
wild Chocolate. I'm Roman Jacobson, Chapter three, The Awakening. Let's
(05:28):
talk about that sabled place called chu Wow Wow che
Wow che wowca cow chocolate wow Wow. It's quite musical.
People elevated, levitated, as you know, the Vatican of Chocolate.
The Chuow Holy War began in when Alessio Tessiery and
(05:48):
his sister Cecilia launched their chocolate company am A Day
Ahma Day was this upstart out of Italy, a brother
and sister team, kind of like you know Phineas and
Billy Hilish right. Like most of all chocolate tiers, I'm
and I didn't make its own chocolate. Instead, it bought
product from one of the handful of giant companies that
made chocola from beans. That practice is still common. Amini
(06:12):
wanted to be a very high end chocolate tier, and
that meant they needed a supply of top notch chocolate,
and in the nine nineties, that meant doing something no
Italian ever wants to do. They needed to suck up
to France. French chocolate making goes back quite a ways,
and like everything of French couture, they regarded themselves at
(06:34):
the highest pinnacle in this case, there's no question where
the particular sucking up needed to take place. They go
to tan Lemitage, which is south of Leone in France,
to the house of val Roona. Bell Rona had the
best supply of Grand Crew level chocolate in the world.
Val Rona had this la la reputation back then and
(06:55):
even still today. It's highly renowned, highly regarded. Very new
chocolate maker who wanted to enter the upper echelon had
to make the pilgrimage to detain hermitage and prostrate themselves
before the lords of chocolate. And that's what Alessie Cecilia did,
after waiting months for an appointment. The story goes, these
young Italians show up and the French snub them, which
(07:18):
is kind of a national trait, you know, with all
apologies to the French people in the world. Uh, they said, nah,
you're you're you're too below our standard. We can't deal
with you. Sent away empty handed, you know, come back
when you've reached a sufficient level of cultural enlightenment. They
were feeling, as I said, snubbed. They went back to Italy,
you know, with their tails between their legs and they
(07:40):
were like hm, hmmm, we'll remember that. Not only did
they remember it, they devoted their lives to avenging the insult,
which basically what was kind of a declaration of war
as some people saw it. And you know what happens
when France and Italy clash. Let me think about you
(08:00):
got products and Hermes, you've got our money and Louis Vattan.
This is a rivalry. So Alessio and Cecilia came up
with a new business plan. Cecilia would learn to make
chocolate from the beans, and Alessia would figure out where
(08:22):
to get the good stuff. Alessia spent the hustling. He
traversed Latin America, meeting with farmers, tasting beans, doing everything
he could to make himself the ultimate insider, and that
work paid off. By the two thousands, Amaday was making
some of the most coveted single rigs and chocolate bars
in the world. But Alessio had just begun and he
(08:42):
was dead set on securing the most prized beans of all,
chew wow. He worked at it for years, slowly earning
trust on the ground, building relationships, buying new uniforms for
the baseball team. They do whatever, pretty much it takes
so to speak. Not only were they bearing gifts, but
they all pledged to pay in advance. That's pretty good. Ultimately,
(09:05):
it came down to cold, hard cash. Amada offered to
triple the price of Varona was paying, and to pay
up front, and it worked. In two thousand four, the
coup was complete. The Chewaw Cooperative sent registered letters to
Valona and other chocolate makers. All of its beans will
be going to Amidae, and only Amada had the right
to use its name. For years, rumors have persisted that
(09:27):
this war got really nasty. We've heard all sorts of
things that, you know, somebody got shot from Valona over this,
and not exactly What did happen was that in two
thousand two, the director of Venezuela's coco buying network was
machine gunned in his car. There's no evidence it was
(09:47):
related to the battle for chihuah but Venezuela, along with
many other parts of Latin America, has come to lead
the world in violent crime and business. Even the chocolate
business can get caught up in it. The real lesson
of Chuao is that same companies were willing to go
to ridiculous lengths in an incredibly dangerous region. Simply to
(10:08):
tie up beans with great flavor because they knew that
flavor could set them apart. But why was that what
made those Chuao beings so special? Well, it certainly has
something to do with the valley, the rivers, the soil,
the trees themselves, But the real secret to Chua's greatness
it was those women handling the beans on the church plasma.
(10:30):
Maybe you've already figured it out. It all came down
to fermentation. How big a factor is the fermentation? Like
huge fermentation, man is definitely of the quality of the
final chocolate. Fermentation is critical. Okay, I know that word
has already popped up a few times, but believe it
or not, a lot of our story hinges on it,
(10:51):
and you're going to hear it again. Fermentation, fermentation, fermentation,
and again, what the hell is fermentation? This is the
first step the careful process of making the world's most
popular flavor. Just like grapes don't taste like wine, rock
at cow beans don't taste much like chocolate. You need
microbes to consume the raw material and transform it into
(11:13):
those wonderfully aromatic compounds. To cow seeds come out of
their pods covered in sweet sticky sugary pulp. When the
beans are removed from the pods, the sugary pulp surrounding
the bean begins to ferment. To keep up those beans
in a pile or put them in a wooden box,
wild geese in the environment will turn that sugar into alcohol,
and then bacteria will turn the alcohol into vinegar. The
(11:36):
acid breaks open the cells and the beans, spills the
contents together and initiates a lot of crazy chemistry. In
the process, heat is generated, and the overall effect of
this mild natural treatment is the development of a desirable
brown color of fine, full flavor. Within days, nutty, spicy, winey, fruity,
(11:59):
and laural notes appear from there. You just have to
get the beans nice and dried, give them a little
roast than a slow grind, and you've got chocolate because
of the ter war, because of how it's fermented, the
things in the air, the yeasts and the bacteria that
are contributing to fermentation, and the soil and all these
things you know you hear about in wine. You're going
(12:22):
to taste the same thing with chocolate. But fermentation is
a delicate art. You mess up the fermentation process, you
don't do the turns on time. You can get absolutely
disgusting coco out of great raw material. And what does
that taste like. It's more like mushroom rotten socks, or
ham chocolate or cheese chocolate. You get some really nasty flavors,
(12:44):
wet sock chocolate, compost chocolate. Most coco farmers just want
to get their being sold as quickly as possible, so
they don't take the time to do a proper fermentation.
Those beans will always be bitter and boring. But it's
the right decision for the farmers. Remember this is a
dirt poor commodity. Time is money. Why go to extra
(13:08):
steps to improve flavor if you aren't going to be
paid anything extra. But Chua was different. When the chocolate
from Chiuao developed, his great reputation in the fermentation was
practically a lost art. The women of Chuah were one
of the few groups doing it properly, and it showed.
But by the two thousands, demand for great cacao was surging.
A new wave of upstarts like Amada was cutting out
(13:30):
the middlemen, scouring the Americas for the next Chua, making
their own chocolate from the beans and raising the art
of chocolate to new heights, and although that first wave
was European, it stayed small until it reached the other
side of the Atlantic. There it found an eager market
obsessed with quality and authenticity, and it became a full
(13:51):
blown tsunami. But have them tastes like grocery store chocolate
at first. Then I'd have them taste three bars that
tasted like people would be like, yep, we're in we
love it. We had fifty bars, we went to a hundred,
and then a couple of years later we probably had
two hundred, and then you come full circle to today.
We have probably five fifty bars on the shelf. I
(14:13):
haven't counted in a long time modeling. Every gold rush
brings winners and losers, and the craft chocolate revolution was
no difference. A lot of dinosaurs fell by the wayside,
too slow to react to the shift and taste, and
a few nimble players rushed in to fill the gap.
Most surprising of all was a small Delhi in Salt
(14:35):
Lake City that came out of nowhere to become the
ultimate champion of wild chocolate. A Cinderella story. After the break,
(14:58):
I want to taste of some of this God level chocolate.
We Got You Covered. Kalia Scop has joined forces with
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to go along with its very podcast Taste One has
driven many to near madness at www. Dot Stetler dash
Chocolate dot com. In the early two thousands, a lot
(15:27):
of Americans were having the kind of epiphany that Mark
Christian had at the Amide booth at the Chocolate Show,
including Matt Caputo. I discovered that good chocolate shouldn't just
taste like burned material deluded with loads of extra fat
and vanilla. Matt's the owner of Caputo's Market in Delhi
(15:48):
in Salt Lake City, and today he's the top importer
especialty chocolate in North America. We now seld over three
thousand wholesale accounts everyone from Whole Foods to you know,
your mom and pop cheese shop on the corener in
all fifty states. But back into a thousand, we basically
had a really similar set to what you'd see in
the grocery store, just cheap stuff that I found out
(16:11):
later didn't taste like cacao. One of my friends that
I respected really well just kind of said you know, man,
your chocolate set is really embarrassing. Matt was crushed. Capudas
wasn't just a market, It was an extension of his
own personal tastes, a reflection of his abilities as a curator.
He knew he had to get up to speed, so
he embarked on a pilgrimage to the one place where
(16:32):
he might find enlightenment. The fancy Food Show in New
York City. I'm walking the aisles of the Italian Pavilion,
and man, those Italians wear suits so well, they're just
beautiful suits. All these dudes and suits and ladies in suits,
and so here I am, this punk kid in my
you know t shirt from Salt Lake City and just
standing at the counters patiently waiting for someone to talk
(16:55):
to me. Finally, a woman at one of the booths
to pity on him and sat him out at a
table and perform the ritual that has initiated many a
convert into the mystery cult of fine chocolate. She said,
I'm gonna let you taste these three chocolates. They only
have two ingredients, cocaw beans and sugar. She says, They're
(17:15):
all made on the same equipment with the same recipe.
The only difference is where the cocow beans come from.
She says. This first one that you're going to taste
is from Ecuador, and you're going to notice that it
is very earthy and very nutty, and there's not a
lot of acidity. And so okay. I taste it, and
I'm just thinking to myself, like, wow, that's really uncanny
(17:38):
that that does taste like that. Now these beans, she said, again,
same ingredients, same percentage, produced on the same equipment, but
this time they come from the Samburano Valley of Madagascar.
This one will taste like fruit, like tart, raspberries and
and citrus. And I'm preparing myself for very slight differences.
I pop it in my mouth. It didn't taste like chocolate.
(18:01):
It tastes like fresh tropical fruit. I could feel myself
like falling down the rabbit hole, and I knew this
didn't taste like candy. This tasted like the food of
the gods. When he headed home, Matt immediately got Capuda's
up to speed. I spent the next year, let's say,
(18:22):
fleshing out our chocolate set, you know, say, picking the
twenty best producers that I had read about and again.
I did a lot of studying along the way, a
lot of talking to experts in the industry, and doing
a lot of blind tasting, like truly blind tasting. My
wife would actually help me. We would do it in
a pitch black room and taste like sixteen different chocolates
(18:43):
at a time. The standouts went on the shelf of
codas brands like on a day DOMI at the time, Um,
those were the Italian ones, some of the French or
like Michelle quisel Bo, not Valona. Probably Sharpenburger was the
only American one at that time. I probably fleshed out
with about fifty bars, probably from about twenty producers, and
(19:05):
shelf kept getting bigger, and it probably took up instead
of two ft let's say, the new bars were a
lot prizier than the old ones, like ten bucks instead
of two. But to Matt's amazement, it didn't matter. All
he had to do was give customers one taste of
this brave new world, and they were loading up their
(19:26):
kurt with chocolate. Verst Viva La Revolution. Caputos was just
one of many stores across the States where that kind
of transformation was happening. In the mid two thousands, chocolate
could be an experience, and people were eager to have it,
to taste their way through Venezuela and Ecuador and the
Sambrano Valley, and websites like Mark Christians sprung up to
guide them. And then in the midst of all this
(19:49):
coco craziness, a new bar appeared. It was wild and refined.
It didn't taste like any of the others, not even close.
While every other chocolate in the world was made with
cocao that had been domesticated and adapted to farms, this
was primordial and you're getting this taste of way back
when it's a time machine, and so unless you're the
(20:11):
age of like Methuselah or oldest Diamonds, even though had
anything like that before, nobody had. The bar had a
funny name. Instead of the ground Cruise of Valona and Bona,
this was Cruise Salvage Wild. It's time. It could not
have been better. It was about to become the buzziest
bar in the bush and dry Voker Layman even deeper
(20:33):
into the jungle in surger More the world. Gold raises
immediately the eyebrow of a person if you say, oh,
I have gold on my land, then everybody feels like
you're rich. But I know more people who got poor
(20:54):
than rich looking for gold. They didn't see the real
gold at for the break a whole hill of beans.
(21:26):
I never had a business plan then, like so many
tons and this, and then and then, and the full
blown business plan I never had. By two thousand five,
felsh Lean, the Swiss company that was making chocolate with
Vulcar beans, was so confident in the unique appeal of
crusavage that it was ready to roll it out at
full commercial scale. That meant no more cutes the experiments.
(21:48):
With four kilos, they needed as much as Vulgar could
possibly get. I said, yeah, okay, let's try with a
container first, and the shipping container holds fifteen tons of cacao.
That was the minimum Felshally needed to make the bars.
But for solo player like Vulcar, that's a huge hill
of beans. Ran Quila Dad could produce only a few tons.
(22:09):
The rest he was going to have to buy from
other harvesters in the region. Once again, he'd be navigating
land that was precious to some of the most dangerous
people in the world, ranchers, illegal loggers, and narcas, and
he was going to need a ton of cash. He
was going to have to build facilities in the rainforest
where the beans could be fermented to his specifications, and
(22:30):
he was going to have to spend all that money
many months before he'd finally get paid for the beans.
The biggest problem getting finance to get like dollars together.
So he asked specially into front him some dough and
they were not interested. They've been around for a hundred
years because they didn't let romance cloud their business vision.
They basically said, you get the beans, will pay you
(22:52):
a decent price, but the getting part that's on you.
Eventually he scored alone from a Swiss company that special
liss and fair trade foods. They're getting me money, but
just on on my blue eyes. Yeah, and they said, okay,
we hope you'll come back with kak. You'll know that, yeah, yeah, yeah.
(23:21):
How to do that? Well? For starters, he bought himself
a dirt bike and rode hundreds of miles across the range,
visiting the towns in the region that had to cow
and setting up buying posts. It was a rough ride,
but it was better than the horse. He hired people
to buy for him in each town and told them
to use tarts to keep the beans dry. But the
only types they had were moth eaten ones made from
(23:42):
cow and jaguar skins, so he flew a bunch of
new ones in from Santa Cruz and handed them out.
He kept in touch with everyone by short wave radio.
When the beans were ready, he drove his bike to
each town, loaded them onto a riverboat, and sent them
on a two thousand mile journey to Lapaz. Then he
lout la Pause and rented an old racquetball court to
(24:03):
use as a warehouse. He didn't sleep for a week
while he waited for the beans to arrive. Finally they
showed up. He immediately opened the sacks and not good.
About ten percent had turned moldy on the river trip,
so he hired eight people to help him, and they
spent the next two weeks on the floor of the
racquetball court sorting eighteen tons of tiny beans by hand.
(24:25):
When he had fifteen good tons, he packed them into
a container and trucked it over a fifteen thousand foot
mountain pass and along some of the world's most death
defying roads to the sea, where a feeder vessel took
it to Panama and loaded it onto a giant container ship,
which carried it through the canal, across the Atlantic and
into port in Rotterdam, where yet another feeder vessel carried
(24:47):
it up the Rhine to Switzerland, where at long last
felshly and transformed it into Cruisavage. It was an enormous feat,
and soon the pros were getting their hands on their
first ours. One of them was Matt Capuda. I'm not
exactly sure when I first heard of Cruisivage. You know,
you hear of a bunch of things. You don't at
(25:09):
first know what is going to turn out to be
something legitimately super cool, or what's going to turn out
to be something that's you know, marketing, smoke and mirrors.
So Matt was skeptical. He tried Felshin's chocolate before and
never been that impressed, But that was about to change.
When I popped it into my mouth, I immediately recognized
(25:30):
that it was vastly more interesting than anything else that
they made that I had previously traded. You know, sometimes
I talked about chocolate like music, and this was like,
you know, a classic symphony orchestra, justist beautiful. Matt wasn't alone.
(25:52):
The world's alcoholics went gaga for cruisivage, and felsh Lee
knew it needed more beans, this time thirty tons instead
of fifteen Tonquilda the quality. That was the part that
was most interested in, and Lene pushed me into the volume,
and I was never interested in the volume. Volker was worried.
(26:14):
He pulled off a miracle the first time, but he
didn't know if he could do it again. But he
knew if he couldn't supply the beans to felsh Lean,
somebody else would. So he made it happen, paying dozens
of middlemen to be his buyers, building fermentation houses in
the bush, charter excessence so you could check on quality,
renting storage rooms and ceedy towns, and paying guards to
watch them. Growing every year, o back into the business
(26:37):
and borrowing more. Besides, he'd become Bolivia's cacao kingpin. Any
of Olivia's cocaine kingpins would have recognized the fundamentals of
his business, and they had recognized the next development, too, competition.
As word got out about wild believing cocao, new players
jumped into the game. There were many copies, bad copies,
(27:00):
good copies of what I did, so it became actually
big big. Most of the newbies were nonprofits interested in
sustainable developments. They had lots of foundation money to spend
and little interest in turning a profit. The laws supply
and demand took its course. The price for wild boliving
cacao exploded from forty cents a pound to more than
(27:21):
two dollars. Things got totally out of hand. Prices went up,
sky rocking, and NGOs flooming in making projects. In a way,
this was mission accomplished. Volker's dream of creating a new
forest economy, one that preserved the environment while simultaneously bringing
money to the area had come true. The people were
(27:44):
getting real money for their cacao, their lives improved, and
they're interested in the chocolateales returned. It was textbook sustainable development,
except for everything it did for the rainforest. It wasn't
sustainable for Vulcar. Neither felt really nor any other commercial
buyer could afford to pay enough for the beans to
cover his costs, and by two thousand ten he found
(28:07):
himself priced out of the market he'd created. It was
like ten years of turmoil, and I said, this is
not what I signed I signed for. He needed a
new supply cocao that hadn't yet exploded in price, and
that was one advantage he still had over the competition.
(28:28):
All these newcomers only knew how to buy beans from
the most obvious players. But Vulcar had twenty years of
connections all over the Bolivian Amazon, and he worked his
connections for any leads on new sources of wild cocao,
and finally he got a good one. On the Monterey River.
In Uraka, a tribal territory, were vast supplies of wild cocao.
(28:49):
He got in touch with the chief, who said that
Urakare had been selling to local dealers for very low
prices and they might be very interested in a new arrangement.
So Volker made plans for an expedition to make his pitch,
And that, of course, was when I got in touch
with him. And if he ever thought, well, this is
a pretty weird spot to bring a journalist, he never
(29:09):
told me. And your grandpa hold this, Yeah, that's the
way I watch your fingers that don't get in between.
Good luck. The river village is called Elcombate, named for
a battle in one of Olivia's endless border squabbles with
(29:30):
its neighbors, and it still has the feel of a
place that doesn't really belong to anywhere. And the village
itself it's a disaster zone. A thin sheet of river
is flowing through the settlement. The boats are tied up
to the huts, chickens perched on posts, trying to come
up with plan B. I wasn't recording audio back on
that two thousand ten trip, but the memories are still
(29:51):
etched in Volker's mind. It was and from a production
point of view, in a miserable situation and mean from
the mango trees are bags of very sad looking cacao.
The coco was badly treated and due to the weather condition,
I saw that the coca was wasn't so good. So
that was a little disappointing right there. But I thought, oh,
(30:15):
let's let's talk to the people find out what are
their needs. We gather on a platform in the center
of the village and Vulgar makes his pitch. The argument
was mainly that I will come all the years and
I will buy the cow at their spot so they
don't have to travel, and that we well, we were
(30:37):
working together and improving the quality because I needed a
better quality than what they have, and so I said, okay,
if you do all this, then I can give you
a very good price. To sweeten the d l focused
brought entertainment from his pack. He produces some paper and
crayons and holds a CaCO drawing contest for the kids.
(31:00):
I said, okay, we give a price to the best
painting with the theme of cocao. What would you paint
about kaw? And I still have them somewhere. Soon dozens
of pages of golden pods and crazy cocoutry people are
covering the school benches and we're all laughing hysterically, and
(31:23):
that turns out to be the exact pitch Vulcar needed
to make. All along. The women have combat am been
watching us, and they're smiling at this goofy Germans drawing
cocao monsters with their kids, And soon they Involker are
chatting away like old friends, and then losing the tensions
to the moms because finally the moms they all the
(31:44):
ladies they were in favor. By the next morning, we
leave Combati with a deal. Vulcan will build them a
fermentation center so they can dry their cocaw properly and
he'll send a boat to buy the cow on the
spot at a premium price. We planned on spending the
night in a riverside hut that belonged to our guide's brother,
(32:04):
But when we arrive, we're greeted by scene out of
a horror movie. Somebody has spent the day opening thousands
of pods there and drying the beans in the hut.
Ants are swarming every service, gorging on the sugary juice.
By now, I have a healthy fear of Amazonian ants.
They move in waves across the jungle floor, attacking anything
(32:24):
in their path. Bugs, frogs, lizards, journalists rowan. He came
with the flip flops, or sometimes he has, and I said, oh,
this is no good, and he did the ant dance.
True story years ago, a drunken man in Bolivia passed
(32:46):
out against a tree that contained a big ant nest.
He never woke up. These ants are I have no
pity the dawn, respect in the repellent or stuff like that.
Damn the mh h. Just stay the night with these
ants would be suicide. We have to find another hut,
(33:08):
but we only have an hour before dark. Our guide
says he knows the place nearby downside channel of the river,
so we head for it. It's on stilts sticking out
of the flooded channel, and there's an old couple standing
in the open door staring at us in the shop,
and so are the piglets and chickens they've rescued from
the flood. The funny part was that we had to
share our bedroom with some pickies. Yes, we're all in
(33:31):
the one room hut together. We string our hammocks above
the piglets and climb in. There smoked predecessors hanging from
the raptors above us, and the mother pig was in
a different shed screaming all night, and they wanted the
babies like where are you? Where are you? And the
little piggies were answering, we're here, We're here. Bats beat
(33:51):
the air in front of my face all night long
as they come and go through the open hut. I
lie wide awake, suspended between pig squeal and diig sausage.
Vulcar stares contentedly beside me. There was a very very
special night. It never happened again. There was a very
(34:13):
very special moment in time. Yeah, I still have night venus.
By the time we drag ourselves back to try and
kill it dad. A few days later, Fulkers put himself
a couple of years ahead of the competition. If all
goes as planned, he'll have enough cocao to make felsh
Lean very happy to pay back his loans and maybe
(34:34):
even to save a bit of money for the first
time in his life. And the story I write about
him and our journey is going to help juice the
world of cacao hunting as a whole new generation of
extreme chocolate makers begins racing to get their hands on
incredible beans. But that's going to plunge them into the
deep end of their own forest, and at times they're
going to find themselves way over their heads. I don't
(34:58):
like guns, and I've never wanted us. Haven't gotten to me.
The idea of having a gun owned by the company
out in the company vehicle is terrifying. But I mean,
you saw the stacks of cash in our office. We're
going out there with thousands of dollars on a daily basis.
Next week we dive into the dark side of big
(35:20):
bad chocolate. Wild Chocolate is a Kaleidoscope production with I
Heart Podcasts, hosted and reported by me Roan Jacobson and
produced by Shane McKeon at Nice Marmaint Media. Edited by
Kate Osborne gesh had to Kudor. Sound design and mixing
(35:43):
by Soundboard. Original music composition by Spencer Stevenson, a k
a Botany production help from Bahi Ni Shory from My
Heart Are. Executive producers are Katrina Norval and Nikki or
Special thanks to Laura Mayor Costaslinos Ozwalash and Aaron Offman,
Will Pearson, codel Burn, Bob Pittman, Daria Daniel and the
(36:04):
team at Stetler who are helping us make a very
special chocolate of our own. That's right, We're working with
Louise and 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 Dot Stetler dash
Chocolate dot com. And if you want to hear more
(36:26):
of this type of content. Nothing is more important to
the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings, and reviews.
Please spread the love wherever you listen
I'm walking down eighteen Street by six a past the
Metro pavilion, and I see this line outside and I'm saying,
what are you guys doing? And they're saying, um, we're
going to the chocolate show. I was like the chocolate show.
(00:34):
That's Mark Christian, chocolate historian, critic, and philosopher. I didn't
get a pH d or anything like that. I gotta
tell you I had earned a c h d. Chocolate Doctor,
Doctor of Chocolate without a doubt, without a doubt. Dr
Chocolate is such a legend that a rave review from
him can propel a new bar to fame and fortune.
(00:54):
But back in the early few thousands, gourmet chocolate wasn't
on his radar. I get in there and I'm walking around.
I instantly I caught on that, you know what, this
is the same crowd as in Amsterdam the Cannabis. The
room was vibing almost the same, and they were such
a captive, passionate group. At the time, Mark was managing
(01:16):
events around the world, including the Cannabis Cup. Now I'm
a non user, but my business partner is more than
a user. He's waking, bake and you know, and shake
the flake all day long, and as he poked around,
his Spidey sense told him that maybe he found the
next big recreational substance. I had an encounter with a
(01:39):
gentleman named Alessio Testier. He with his sister owned a
company called Ama Day. And this guy was speaking in
such you know, classic high falutint terms of this legacy
and lore of chocolate. And he's dressed in this Armandi
suit that's just you know, cut to the max. And
(02:00):
right away might BS detector went off, you know, do
you know it's sort of like, don't bullshit the bullshitter. Okay,
what are you doing? But he said no, no, no,
you don't understand. He's telling me about how he has
this exclusive deal with this place called chew Wow, the
women who was primarily a woman led cooperative. They would
sun and dry the beans on the plaza of the church,
(02:23):
you know, every season, and son there only seven acres.
And he went on and on and on and on,
and I was just saying, come on, chocolate is what's
Halloween candy? What are you talking about? So Alessio gave
markat Chuil Bar to try. It was massive. You know,
Chewa is heavy on the bell. It's big. It's the
(02:44):
blueberry pie of chocolate. It's got massive blueberry appeal. Chua
was considered the greatest chocolate on earth at that time,
and Alessio Tessiery had stolen it. He had tiptoed into
the den of Valona, the French kingpin of gourmet chocolate,
which once held exclusive control over the supply, and pride
(03:05):
it right out of their hands. Alessia was the bad
boy of chocolate, the Alfante rib the young Italian who
refused to play by the French rules, and he wasn't
bullshitting the bullshitter. There really was only a tiny supply
of Chiuao beans coming from a single isolated valley on
the mountainous Venezuela coast, and it really was dried by
(03:27):
a hand by the women of Chuao on the town's
church plaza. And those three factors, the beans, the place,
and the care they set it apart. For years, Valarona
had enjoyed a lock on Chuao and on the world,
especially chocolate. It was the most famous company and Chuaw
was its most coveted bar. But it never paid that
(03:47):
much of a premium to the Chuow Cooperative for those beans,
because back then nobody paid more for beans just because
they tasted good. Cocat wasn't wine. It was treated more
like corn, a commodity, but changed the day Alessia Tessieri
stole you all away. What Alessio understood was that there
(04:10):
was a world of people who thought of chocolate like wine,
and they were willing to pay a lot for a
great experience, and that meant great cacaws like Chuaw were
worth way more than any of the chocolate companies realized.
And as everyone else in the chocolate business figured that out,
all eyes fell in Latin America, Cocao's birthplace. If there
were more choos out there, villages harboring beautiful old varieties
(04:33):
from cocao's pre industrial golden era, that's where they'd be.
The great cacao gold Rush was on. It was almost
a search of gold, but actually hit the cacaw is
the gold, and eventually it was going to lead to
right from Volka Lehman's Olivian doorstack and make him wonder
(04:54):
why he ever got sucked in in the first place.
Sometimes I think all all days for Damn bar On.
Talking from Glidys Delvin i Heeart podcasts, this is obsessions
wild Chocolate. I'm Roman Jacobson, Chapter three, The Awakening. Let's
(05:28):
talk about that sabled place called chu Wow Wow che
Wow che wowca cow chocolate wow Wow. It's quite musical.
People elevated, levitated, as you know, the Vatican of Chocolate.
The Chuow Holy War began in when Alessio Tessiery and
(05:48):
his sister Cecilia launched their chocolate company am A Day
Ahma Day was this upstart out of Italy, a brother
and sister team, kind of like you know Phineas and
Billy Hilish right. Like most of all chocolate tiers, I'm
and I didn't make its own chocolate. Instead, it bought
product from one of the handful of giant companies that
made chocola from beans. That practice is still common. Amini
(06:12):
wanted to be a very high end chocolate tier, and
that meant they needed a supply of top notch chocolate,
and in the nine nineties, that meant doing something no
Italian ever wants to do. They needed to suck up
to France. French chocolate making goes back quite a ways,
and like everything of French couture, they regarded themselves at
(06:34):
the highest pinnacle in this case, there's no question where
the particular sucking up needed to take place. They go
to tan Lemitage, which is south of Leone in France,
to the house of val Roona. Bell Rona had the
best supply of Grand Crew level chocolate in the world.
Val Rona had this la la reputation back then and
(06:55):
even still today. It's highly renowned, highly regarded. Very new
chocolate maker who wanted to enter the upper echelon had
to make the pilgrimage to detain hermitage and prostrate themselves
before the lords of chocolate. And that's what Alessie Cecilia did,
after waiting months for an appointment. The story goes, these
young Italians show up and the French snub them, which
(07:18):
is kind of a national trait, you know, with all
apologies to the French people in the world. Uh, they said, nah,
you're you're you're too below our standard. We can't deal
with you. Sent away empty handed, you know, come back
when you've reached a sufficient level of cultural enlightenment. They
were feeling, as I said, snubbed. They went back to Italy,
you know, with their tails between their legs and they
(07:40):
were like hm, hmmm, we'll remember that. Not only did
they remember it, they devoted their lives to avenging the insult,
which basically what was kind of a declaration of war
as some people saw it. And you know what happens
when France and Italy clash. Let me think about you
(08:00):
got products and Hermes, you've got our money and Louis Vattan.
This is a rivalry. So Alessio and Cecilia came up
with a new business plan. Cecilia would learn to make
chocolate from the beans, and Alessia would figure out where
(08:22):
to get the good stuff. Alessia spent the hustling. He
traversed Latin America, meeting with farmers, tasting beans, doing everything
he could to make himself the ultimate insider, and that
work paid off. By the two thousands, Amaday was making
some of the most coveted single rigs and chocolate bars
in the world. But Alessio had just begun and he
(08:42):
was dead set on securing the most prized beans of all,
chew wow. He worked at it for years, slowly earning
trust on the ground, building relationships, buying new uniforms for
the baseball team. They do whatever, pretty much it takes
so to speak. Not only were they bearing gifts, but
they all pledged to pay in advance. That's pretty good. Ultimately,
(09:05):
it came down to cold, hard cash. Amada offered to
triple the price of Varona was paying, and to pay
up front, and it worked. In two thousand four, the
coup was complete. The Chewaw Cooperative sent registered letters to
Valona and other chocolate makers. All of its beans will
be going to Amidae, and only Amada had the right
to use its name. For years, rumors have persisted that
(09:27):
this war got really nasty. We've heard all sorts of
things that, you know, somebody got shot from Valona over this,
and not exactly What did happen was that in two
thousand two, the director of Venezuela's coco buying network was
machine gunned in his car. There's no evidence it was
(09:47):
related to the battle for chihuah but Venezuela, along with
many other parts of Latin America, has come to lead
the world in violent crime and business. Even the chocolate
business can get caught up in it. The real lesson
of Chuao is that same companies were willing to go
to ridiculous lengths in an incredibly dangerous region. Simply to
(10:08):
tie up beans with great flavor because they knew that
flavor could set them apart. But why was that what
made those Chuao beings so special? Well, it certainly has
something to do with the valley, the rivers, the soil,
the trees themselves, But the real secret to Chua's greatness
it was those women handling the beans on the church plasma.
(10:30):
Maybe you've already figured it out. It all came down
to fermentation. How big a factor is the fermentation? Like
huge fermentation, man is definitely of the quality of the
final chocolate. Fermentation is critical. Okay, I know that word
has already popped up a few times, but believe it
or not, a lot of our story hinges on it,
(10:51):
and you're going to hear it again. Fermentation, fermentation, fermentation,
and again, what the hell is fermentation? This is the
first step the careful process of making the world's most
popular flavor. Just like grapes don't taste like wine, rock
at cow beans don't taste much like chocolate. You need
microbes to consume the raw material and transform it into
(11:13):
those wonderfully aromatic compounds. To cow seeds come out of
their pods covered in sweet sticky sugary pulp. When the
beans are removed from the pods, the sugary pulp surrounding
the bean begins to ferment. To keep up those beans
in a pile or put them in a wooden box,
wild geese in the environment will turn that sugar into alcohol,
and then bacteria will turn the alcohol into vinegar. The
(11:36):
acid breaks open the cells and the beans, spills the
contents together and initiates a lot of crazy chemistry. In
the process, heat is generated, and the overall effect of
this mild natural treatment is the development of a desirable
brown color of fine, full flavor. Within days, nutty, spicy, winey, fruity,
(11:59):
and laural notes appear from there. You just have to
get the beans nice and dried, give them a little
roast than a slow grind, and you've got chocolate because
of the ter war, because of how it's fermented, the
things in the air, the yeasts and the bacteria that
are contributing to fermentation, and the soil and all these
things you know you hear about in wine. You're going
(12:22):
to taste the same thing with chocolate. But fermentation is
a delicate art. You mess up the fermentation process, you
don't do the turns on time. You can get absolutely
disgusting coco out of great raw material. And what does
that taste like. It's more like mushroom rotten socks, or
ham chocolate or cheese chocolate. You get some really nasty flavors,
(12:44):
wet sock chocolate, compost chocolate. Most coco farmers just want
to get their being sold as quickly as possible, so
they don't take the time to do a proper fermentation.
Those beans will always be bitter and boring. But it's
the right decision for the farmers. Remember this is a
dirt poor commodity. Time is money. Why go to extra
(13:08):
steps to improve flavor if you aren't going to be
paid anything extra. But Chua was different. When the chocolate
from Chiuao developed, his great reputation in the fermentation was
practically a lost art. The women of Chuah were one
of the few groups doing it properly, and it showed.
But by the two thousands, demand for great cacao was surging.
A new wave of upstarts like Amada was cutting out
(13:30):
the middlemen, scouring the Americas for the next Chua, making
their own chocolate from the beans and raising the art
of chocolate to new heights, and although that first wave
was European, it stayed small until it reached the other
side of the Atlantic. There it found an eager market
obsessed with quality and authenticity, and it became a full
(13:51):
blown tsunami. But have them tastes like grocery store chocolate
at first. Then I'd have them taste three bars that
tasted like people would be like, yep, we're in we
love it. We had fifty bars, we went to a hundred,
and then a couple of years later we probably had
two hundred, and then you come full circle to today.
We have probably five fifty bars on the shelf. I
(14:13):
haven't counted in a long time modeling. Every gold rush
brings winners and losers, and the craft chocolate revolution was
no difference. A lot of dinosaurs fell by the wayside,
too slow to react to the shift and taste, and
a few nimble players rushed in to fill the gap.
Most surprising of all was a small Delhi in Salt
(14:35):
Lake City that came out of nowhere to become the
ultimate champion of wild chocolate. A Cinderella story. After the break,
(14:58):
I want to taste of some of this God level chocolate.
We Got You Covered. Kalia Scop has joined forces with
Louise Abram and Stetler Chocolate to make a special box
to go along with its very podcast Taste One has
driven many to near madness at www. Dot Stetler dash
Chocolate dot com. In the early two thousands, a lot
(15:27):
of Americans were having the kind of epiphany that Mark
Christian had at the Amide booth at the Chocolate Show,
including Matt Caputo. I discovered that good chocolate shouldn't just
taste like burned material deluded with loads of extra fat
and vanilla. Matt's the owner of Caputo's Market in Delhi
(15:48):
in Salt Lake City, and today he's the top importer
especialty chocolate in North America. We now seld over three
thousand wholesale accounts everyone from Whole Foods to you know,
your mom and pop cheese shop on the corener in
all fifty states. But back into a thousand, we basically
had a really similar set to what you'd see in
the grocery store, just cheap stuff that I found out
(16:11):
later didn't taste like cacao. One of my friends that
I respected really well just kind of said you know, man,
your chocolate set is really embarrassing. Matt was crushed. Capudas
wasn't just a market, It was an extension of his
own personal tastes, a reflection of his abilities as a curator.
He knew he had to get up to speed, so
he embarked on a pilgrimage to the one place where
(16:32):
he might find enlightenment. The fancy Food Show in New
York City. I'm walking the aisles of the Italian Pavilion,
and man, those Italians wear suits so well, they're just
beautiful suits. All these dudes and suits and ladies in suits,
and so here I am, this punk kid in my
you know t shirt from Salt Lake City and just
standing at the counters patiently waiting for someone to talk
(16:55):
to me. Finally, a woman at one of the booths
to pity on him and sat him out at a
table and perform the ritual that has initiated many a
convert into the mystery cult of fine chocolate. She said,
I'm gonna let you taste these three chocolates. They only
have two ingredients, cocaw beans and sugar. She says, They're
(17:15):
all made on the same equipment with the same recipe.
The only difference is where the cocow beans come from.
She says. This first one that you're going to taste
is from Ecuador, and you're going to notice that it
is very earthy and very nutty, and there's not a
lot of acidity. And so okay. I taste it, and
I'm just thinking to myself, like, wow, that's really uncanny
(17:38):
that that does taste like that. Now these beans, she said, again,
same ingredients, same percentage, produced on the same equipment, but
this time they come from the Samburano Valley of Madagascar.
This one will taste like fruit, like tart, raspberries and
and citrus. And I'm preparing myself for very slight differences.
I pop it in my mouth. It didn't taste like chocolate.
(18:01):
It tastes like fresh tropical fruit. I could feel myself
like falling down the rabbit hole, and I knew this
didn't taste like candy. This tasted like the food of
the gods. When he headed home, Matt immediately got Capuda's
up to speed. I spent the next year, let's say,
(18:22):
fleshing out our chocolate set, you know, say, picking the
twenty best producers that I had read about and again.
I did a lot of studying along the way, a
lot of talking to experts in the industry, and doing
a lot of blind tasting, like truly blind tasting. My
wife would actually help me. We would do it in
a pitch black room and taste like sixteen different chocolates
(18:43):
at a time. The standouts went on the shelf of
codas brands like on a day DOMI at the time, Um,
those were the Italian ones, some of the French or
like Michelle quisel Bo, not Valona. Probably Sharpenburger was the
only American one at that time. I probably fleshed out
with about fifty bars, probably from about twenty producers, and
(19:05):
shelf kept getting bigger, and it probably took up instead
of two ft let's say, the new bars were a
lot prizier than the old ones, like ten bucks instead
of two. But to Matt's amazement, it didn't matter. All
he had to do was give customers one taste of
this brave new world, and they were loading up their
(19:26):
kurt with chocolate. Verst Viva La Revolution. Caputos was just
one of many stores across the States where that kind
of transformation was happening. In the mid two thousands, chocolate
could be an experience, and people were eager to have it,
to taste their way through Venezuela and Ecuador and the
Sambrano Valley, and websites like Mark Christians sprung up to
guide them. And then in the midst of all this
(19:49):
coco craziness, a new bar appeared. It was wild and refined.
It didn't taste like any of the others, not even close.
While every other chocolate in the world was made with
cocao that had been domesticated and adapted to farms, this
was primordial and you're getting this taste of way back
when it's a time machine, and so unless you're the
(20:11):
age of like Methuselah or oldest Diamonds, even though had
anything like that before, nobody had. The bar had a
funny name. Instead of the ground Cruise of Valona and Bona,
this was Cruise Salvage Wild. It's time. It could not
have been better. It was about to become the buzziest
bar in the bush and dry Voker Layman even deeper
(20:33):
into the jungle in surger More the world. Gold raises
immediately the eyebrow of a person if you say, oh,
I have gold on my land, then everybody feels like
you're rich. But I know more people who got poor
(20:54):
than rich looking for gold. They didn't see the real
gold at for the break a whole hill of beans.
(21:26):
I never had a business plan then, like so many
tons and this, and then and then, and the full
blown business plan I never had. By two thousand five,
felsh Lean, the Swiss company that was making chocolate with
Vulcar beans, was so confident in the unique appeal of
crusavage that it was ready to roll it out at
full commercial scale. That meant no more cutes the experiments.
(21:48):
With four kilos, they needed as much as Vulgar could
possibly get. I said, yeah, okay, let's try with a
container first, and the shipping container holds fifteen tons of cacao.
That was the minimum Felshally needed to make the bars.
But for solo player like Vulcar, that's a huge hill
of beans. Ran Quila Dad could produce only a few tons.
(22:09):
The rest he was going to have to buy from
other harvesters in the region. Once again, he'd be navigating
land that was precious to some of the most dangerous
people in the world, ranchers, illegal loggers, and narcas, and
he was going to need a ton of cash. He
was going to have to build facilities in the rainforest
where the beans could be fermented to his specifications, and
(22:30):
he was going to have to spend all that money
many months before he'd finally get paid for the beans.
The biggest problem getting finance to get like dollars together.
So he asked specially into front him some dough and
they were not interested. They've been around for a hundred
years because they didn't let romance cloud their business vision.
They basically said, you get the beans, will pay you
(22:52):
a decent price, but the getting part that's on you.
Eventually he scored alone from a Swiss company that special
liss and fair trade foods. They're getting me money, but
just on on my blue eyes. Yeah, and they said, okay,
we hope you'll come back with kak. You'll know that, yeah, yeah, yeah.
(23:21):
How to do that? Well? For starters, he bought himself
a dirt bike and rode hundreds of miles across the range,
visiting the towns in the region that had to cow
and setting up buying posts. It was a rough ride,
but it was better than the horse. He hired people
to buy for him in each town and told them
to use tarts to keep the beans dry. But the
only types they had were moth eaten ones made from
(23:42):
cow and jaguar skins, so he flew a bunch of
new ones in from Santa Cruz and handed them out.
He kept in touch with everyone by short wave radio.
When the beans were ready, he drove his bike to
each town, loaded them onto a riverboat, and sent them
on a two thousand mile journey to Lapaz. Then he
lout la Pause and rented an old racquetball court to
(24:03):
use as a warehouse. He didn't sleep for a week
while he waited for the beans to arrive. Finally they
showed up. He immediately opened the sacks and not good.
About ten percent had turned moldy on the river trip,
so he hired eight people to help him, and they
spent the next two weeks on the floor of the
racquetball court sorting eighteen tons of tiny beans by hand.
(24:25):
When he had fifteen good tons, he packed them into
a container and trucked it over a fifteen thousand foot
mountain pass and along some of the world's most death
defying roads to the sea, where a feeder vessel took
it to Panama and loaded it onto a giant container ship,
which carried it through the canal, across the Atlantic and
into port in Rotterdam, where yet another feeder vessel carried
(24:47):
it up the Rhine to Switzerland, where at long last
felshly and transformed it into Cruisavage. It was an enormous feat,
and soon the pros were getting their hands on their
first ours. One of them was Matt Capuda. I'm not
exactly sure when I first heard of Cruisivage. You know,
you hear of a bunch of things. You don't at
(25:09):
first know what is going to turn out to be
something legitimately super cool, or what's going to turn out
to be something that's you know, marketing, smoke and mirrors.
So Matt was skeptical. He tried Felshin's chocolate before and
never been that impressed, But that was about to change.
When I popped it into my mouth, I immediately recognized
(25:30):
that it was vastly more interesting than anything else that
they made that I had previously traded. You know, sometimes
I talked about chocolate like music, and this was like,
you know, a classic symphony orchestra, justist beautiful. Matt wasn't alone.
(25:52):
The world's alcoholics went gaga for cruisivage, and felsh Lee
knew it needed more beans, this time thirty tons instead
of fifteen Tonquilda the quality. That was the part that
was most interested in, and Lene pushed me into the volume,
and I was never interested in the volume. Volker was worried.
(26:14):
He pulled off a miracle the first time, but he
didn't know if he could do it again. But he
knew if he couldn't supply the beans to felsh Lean,
somebody else would. So he made it happen, paying dozens
of middlemen to be his buyers, building fermentation houses in
the bush, charter excessence so you could check on quality,
renting storage rooms and ceedy towns, and paying guards to
watch them. Growing every year, o back into the business
(26:37):
and borrowing more. Besides, he'd become Bolivia's cacao kingpin. Any
of Olivia's cocaine kingpins would have recognized the fundamentals of
his business, and they had recognized the next development, too, competition.
As word got out about wild believing cocao, new players
jumped into the game. There were many copies, bad copies,
(27:00):
good copies of what I did, so it became actually
big big. Most of the newbies were nonprofits interested in
sustainable developments. They had lots of foundation money to spend
and little interest in turning a profit. The laws supply
and demand took its course. The price for wild boliving
cacao exploded from forty cents a pound to more than
(27:21):
two dollars. Things got totally out of hand. Prices went up,
sky rocking, and NGOs flooming in making projects. In a way,
this was mission accomplished. Volker's dream of creating a new
forest economy, one that preserved the environment while simultaneously bringing
money to the area had come true. The people were
(27:44):
getting real money for their cacao, their lives improved, and
they're interested in the chocolateales returned. It was textbook sustainable development,
except for everything it did for the rainforest. It wasn't
sustainable for Vulcar. Neither felt really nor any other commercial
buyer could afford to pay enough for the beans to
cover his costs, and by two thousand ten he found
(28:07):
himself priced out of the market he'd created. It was
like ten years of turmoil, and I said, this is
not what I signed I signed for. He needed a
new supply cocao that hadn't yet exploded in price, and
that was one advantage he still had over the competition.
(28:28):
All these newcomers only knew how to buy beans from
the most obvious players. But Vulcar had twenty years of
connections all over the Bolivian Amazon, and he worked his
connections for any leads on new sources of wild cocao,
and finally he got a good one. On the Monterey River.
In Uraka, a tribal territory, were vast supplies of wild cocao.
(28:49):
He got in touch with the chief, who said that
Urakare had been selling to local dealers for very low
prices and they might be very interested in a new arrangement.
So Volker made plans for an expedition to make his pitch,
And that, of course, was when I got in touch
with him. And if he ever thought, well, this is
a pretty weird spot to bring a journalist, he never
(29:09):
told me. And your grandpa hold this, Yeah, that's the
way I watch your fingers that don't get in between.
Good luck. The river village is called Elcombate, named for
a battle in one of Olivia's endless border squabbles with
(29:30):
its neighbors, and it still has the feel of a
place that doesn't really belong to anywhere. And the village
itself it's a disaster zone. A thin sheet of river
is flowing through the settlement. The boats are tied up
to the huts, chickens perched on posts, trying to come
up with plan B. I wasn't recording audio back on
that two thousand ten trip, but the memories are still
(29:51):
etched in Volker's mind. It was and from a production
point of view, in a miserable situation and mean from
the mango trees are bags of very sad looking cacao.
The coco was badly treated and due to the weather condition,
I saw that the coca was wasn't so good. So
that was a little disappointing right there. But I thought, oh,
(30:15):
let's let's talk to the people find out what are
their needs. We gather on a platform in the center
of the village and Vulgar makes his pitch. The argument
was mainly that I will come all the years and
I will buy the cow at their spot so they
don't have to travel, and that we well, we were
(30:37):
working together and improving the quality because I needed a
better quality than what they have, and so I said, okay,
if you do all this, then I can give you
a very good price. To sweeten the d l focused
brought entertainment from his pack. He produces some paper and
crayons and holds a CaCO drawing contest for the kids.
(31:00):
I said, okay, we give a price to the best
painting with the theme of cocao. What would you paint
about kaw? And I still have them somewhere. Soon dozens
of pages of golden pods and crazy cocoutry people are
covering the school benches and we're all laughing hysterically, and
(31:23):
that turns out to be the exact pitch Vulcar needed
to make. All along. The women have combat am been
watching us, and they're smiling at this goofy Germans drawing
cocao monsters with their kids, And soon they Involker are
chatting away like old friends, and then losing the tensions
to the moms because finally the moms they all the
(31:44):
ladies they were in favor. By the next morning, we
leave Combati with a deal. Vulcan will build them a
fermentation center so they can dry their cocaw properly and
he'll send a boat to buy the cow on the
spot at a premium price. We planned on spending the
night in a riverside hut that belonged to our guide's brother,
(32:04):
But when we arrive, we're greeted by scene out of
a horror movie. Somebody has spent the day opening thousands
of pods there and drying the beans in the hut.
Ants are swarming every service, gorging on the sugary juice.
By now, I have a healthy fear of Amazonian ants.
They move in waves across the jungle floor, attacking anything
(32:24):
in their path. Bugs, frogs, lizards, journalists rowan. He came
with the flip flops, or sometimes he has, and I said, oh,
this is no good, and he did the ant dance.
True story years ago, a drunken man in Bolivia passed
(32:46):
out against a tree that contained a big ant nest.
He never woke up. These ants are I have no
pity the dawn, respect in the repellent or stuff like that.
Damn the mh h. Just stay the night with these
ants would be suicide. We have to find another hut,
(33:08):
but we only have an hour before dark. Our guide
says he knows the place nearby downside channel of the river,
so we head for it. It's on stilts sticking out
of the flooded channel, and there's an old couple standing
in the open door staring at us in the shop,
and so are the piglets and chickens they've rescued from
the flood. The funny part was that we had to
share our bedroom with some pickies. Yes, we're all in
(33:31):
the one room hut together. We string our hammocks above
the piglets and climb in. There smoked predecessors hanging from
the raptors above us, and the mother pig was in
a different shed screaming all night, and they wanted the
babies like where are you? Where are you? And the
little piggies were answering, we're here, We're here. Bats beat
(33:51):
the air in front of my face all night long
as they come and go through the open hut. I
lie wide awake, suspended between pig squeal and diig sausage.
Vulcar stares contentedly beside me. There was a very very
special night. It never happened again. There was a very
(34:13):
very special moment in time. Yeah, I still have night venus.
By the time we drag ourselves back to try and
kill it dad. A few days later, Fulkers put himself
a couple of years ahead of the competition. If all
goes as planned, he'll have enough cocao to make felsh
Lean very happy to pay back his loans and maybe
(34:34):
even to save a bit of money for the first
time in his life. And the story I write about
him and our journey is going to help juice the
world of cacao hunting as a whole new generation of
extreme chocolate makers begins racing to get their hands on
incredible beans. But that's going to plunge them into the
deep end of their own forest, and at times they're
going to find themselves way over their heads. I don't
(34:58):
like guns, and I've never wanted us. Haven't gotten to me.
The idea of having a gun owned by the company
out in the company vehicle is terrifying. But I mean,
you saw the stacks of cash in our office. We're
going out there with thousands of dollars on a daily basis.
Next week we dive into the dark side of big
(35:20):
bad chocolate. Wild Chocolate is a Kaleidoscope production with I
Heart Podcasts, hosted and reported by me Roan Jacobson and
produced by Shane McKeon at Nice Marmaint Media. Edited by
Kate Osborne gesh had to Kudor. Sound design and mixing
(35:43):
by Soundboard. Original music composition by Spencer Stevenson, a k
a Botany production help from Bahi Ni Shory from My
Heart Are. Executive producers are Katrina Norval and Nikki or
Special thanks to Laura Mayor Costaslinos Ozwalash and Aaron Offman,
Will Pearson, codel Burn, Bob Pittman, Daria Daniel and the
(36:04):
team at Stetler who are helping us make a very
special chocolate of our own. That's right, We're working with
Louise and 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 Dot Stetler dash
Chocolate dot com. And if you want to hear more
(36:26):
of this type of content. Nothing is more important to
the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings, and reviews.
Please spread the love wherever you listen
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