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