Chapter 8

VALRHONA VALHALLA

To hear the world’s finest chocolatiers tell it, the Valrhona factory at Tain l’Hermitage in the heart of France is an earthly equivalent of heaven. The difference, many add, is that Saint Peter surely has a better attitude.

From the first moment I began to poke at the edges of chocolate, the name Valrhona seemed to take an outsized place in any conversation. Soon, I learned to nod sagely and listen. If you talk jewelry, you should at least pretend you know about Tiffany’s. In fact, it is more than that. There are other top-end jewelers.

Valrhona makes about seven thousand tons of chocolate a year. This is one-hundredth of what the Swiss-based Barry Callebaut produces in factories once owned by Cacao Barry in France and Callebaut in Belgium. But, unlike its giant competitor, Valrhona produces only good chocolate. It is obsessive about quality in its limited range of products.

For industrial chocolate, giant companies like Hershey or Nestle simply pour beans into one end of a factory and truck boxes of finished candy bars out the other. Some smaller-scale chocolatiers make their own base product from cacao they may buy at the source. But most people who work with chocolate, fondeurs or bakers, need a reliable wholesale supplier for their most crucial raw material. That is where Valrhona comes in. Valrhona also makes specialty chocolate bars and bonbons that are sold in retail stores.

François Pralus makes some exquisite chocolate base in Roanne, across the Rhone west of Lyon. The output is tiny, however, and it can lack consistency. Few others are even in the running. But for every chocolate pro who swears by Valrhona, there is another who swears at it.

Richard Donnelly, who produces fine ganaches and pralinés at his shop in Santa Cruz, California, spends five figures a year buying Valrhona base. Once he telephoned Valrhona’s United States headquarters with a sensible technical question. “The guy told me that if I called myself a chocolatier, I would know the answer,” Donnelly told me, as much amused as outraged at such a fine example of French arrogance. “And he hung up on me.”

Valrhona denies this is a general attitude. At the company’s booth at the Paris Salon du Chocolat, a senior executive began to explain to me their mannerly approach toward all comers. But his wandering eye picked out someone with whom he had more important business, and he turned away in midsentence.

Valrhona hides behind an aura of mystery. Its Web site dismisses history in a few words: An unnamed pastry chef in the Rhone Valley began the company, or its precursor, in 1924. It leaves the impression that the company is still run by a pastry chef’s family, making no mention that Valrhona is, in fact, a subsidiary of Bongrain, a French food conglomerate that does $5 billion a year in business—and is far more involved in cheese than chocolate.

For a long time, Valrhona seemed to cultivate a deliberate policy of hauteur, a peculiarly French refinement on the general theory of snob appeal. Alan Porter of Britain’s Chocolate Society worked four years to convince Valrhona executives that English palates were worthy of their product. Valrhona finally agreed to sell to Porter, explaining that they were willing to undertake what they called “a marketing experiment.”

When Chloé was a mere independent chocolate consultant in Paris, she made an appointment to visit Valrhona. Her host neglected to pick her up at the train station, as arranged. Finding the factory impenetrable, she simply hiked up her skirt, scaled the wall, and tracked down the man she had come to see.

Years later, in her new role as Fortnum & Mason’s confectionery buyer, she reshaped her department to feature Valrhona. She organized the store’s annual chocolate dinner around the Valrhona specialties she liked best. Soon after, she made another appointment with Valhrona, this time as a customer eager to discuss new products. When she arrived in Tain, she found her meetings had been canceled—Valrhona’s last-minute request for a reconfirmation failed to reach her on the road—and she had to storm the place a second time.

When the company decided to move into the American market, it played on this exclusivity. Many restaurateurs and bakers were reluctant to pay its prices, sometimes three times those of other chocolate base suppliers. But sales representatives targeted top chefs who wrote “Valrhona chocolate” on their menus, thus exciting the interest of American foodies. This, in a short time, built an almost mythical cachet.

Bernard Duclos, the company’s North America representative, liked to say that Valrhona aimed to be the Mouton Rothschild of chocolatedom. Perhaps he was addressing what he considered to be a gullible audience. But he seemed to me what the French would call a bit gonflé, that is, full of himself. A master winemaker not only manicures the same vines over generations but also assembles vintages that improve over decades. A chocolate maker, even Valrhona, buys beans, processes them, and stamps them with a sell-by date usually only months in the future.

Duclos made a point. Valrhona tasters had found that some single-variety beans actually do improve with a season of aging. Certain blends begin to approach the assemblage of wine. The analogy, however, is still a stretch.

With growing competition and a broader world market for high-quality chocolate, old attitudes began to change. Some of Valrhona’s executives and representatives, on occasion, could be downright friendly. Not entirely. David Lebovitz, a California pastry chef, a former star at Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse in Berkeley who now writes books, is a chocolate expert of impeccable taste. He acknowledges that the Tain l’Hermitage masters make good chocolate, and he hates to speak ill of anyone. Nonetheless, he shudders at the mention of their name.

“I was amazed at how difficult they were to approach,” he said, describing research he did in France for his own book on chocolate. This was in 2003, when Valrhona was on a charm offensive to counter threats from the giant Barry Callebaut and small Italian companies seeking to make inroads into its top-quality markets.

“Multiple attempts to contact Valhrona by phone and e-mail all went unanswered,” Lebovitz said, “so I decided to talk to a representative in person at the Salon du Chocolat in Paris. He quickly sized me up and then rather haughtily dismissed me. I was stunned.”

I was stunned, too. Lebovitz is an unusually nice guy, and he clearly knows his stuff.

“I really liked their chocolate, and I very much wanted to learn more about it since they were the pioneers in getting people to appreciate high-quality chocolate,” Lebovitz continued. “I even wanted to enroll in classes at their factory, but for some reason they would not let me. Every chocolate company that I’ve ever been in touch with has been incredibly friendly and more than helpful. Valrhona does not seem to be interested in working with chefs and food writers, and it continues to puzzle me.”

Later, I explained the case to the Valrhona executive in charge of contact with such professionals. I assumed there was some misunderstanding that he would be eager to put right. He had not heard of Lebovitz, he said, and he did not note down the name for any follow up to put things right. If Saint Peter had barred the door, then fate had been written. The case was closed.

 

 

In the end, does it matter? Valrhona, by almost any measure, makes the best range of commercial-scale chocolate anywhere. Since the late 1990s, it has been available not only to professionals but also to anyone who finds the right specialty store and has the money to pay for it. Serious addicts can even track down what Valhrona calls its grands crus in three-kilo boxes of fèves—that means beans, but they are really small ovals of chocolate.

The hallowed original factory, stately with gabled, peaked roofs and brick walls meant to last, sits on a lovely stretch of the Rhone just above Valence. It is best approached by night, walking up an old bargemen’s towpath under the heady scent of flowering trees. Long before you see it, your electrified olfactory senses tell you it is there. That rich aroma of dark chocolate lapping gently back and forth in vats behind the walls masks the riverbank bouquet of honeysuckle, jasmine, roses, or peach blossoms.

Success has brought an additional plant, much larger, at the edge of town. But the company’s soul remains in the old quarters.

Getting permission to visit Valrhona is a little like applying for a North Korean visa. There is seldom an outright refusal, yet the visit does not take place unless someone decides it is in the company’s interest.

For those who are deemed Valrhona-worthy, or who otherwise manage to weasel their way past the heavy steel gates, there is a pleasant surprise. The haughtiness of the public face is missing in the inner sanctum. Valrhona employs Frenchmen who, as God is my witness, all but whistle while they work. Among a full-time staff of four hundred, thirty-year veterans are common.

Confidences are not blithely divulged. Most employees would sooner eat a Mars bar than betray their family trust. Just in case, Valrhona takes no chances. Sacks of beans are coded with numbers and left unlabeled. Only a few senior company officials can determine the country of origin, let alone the specific plantation.

“Too many people are trying to steal our secrets,” said Guillaume Luquel, sales manager for northern Europe, who was tasked with showing me around. “We have to take every precaution we can.”

I visited on a typical morning. Before entering the business end of the plant, I was dressed in a zip-up white gown and a gauze hat, and was given booties to put over my shoes. Not only my watch but also the turquoise bracelet that never leaves my right wrist went into a pocket. Valrhona wanted to take no chance that some baker in Brest might discover Navajo jewelry in a three-kilo cake of Venezuelan chocolate.

After preparation, briefing, and decontamination, Luquel pulled a cord to activate a giant red door. It rolled upward, and I followed him inside. The scene was straight out of any James Bond film you care to remember, toward the end when the good guys penetrate the bad guys’ underground lab just as global destruction is about to occur. Men and women in white scurried about pushing wheeled carts. High-tech forklifts scooted past digital control panels that flashed displays in fireengine red. Conveyor belts and chutes linked production chains.

But this was still old-world France. Salted among the fancy stainless-steel machinery, the odd relic with details in handsome polished wood performed some essential task in a reliable fashion dating back generations.

Luquel gave me a full tour, with generous explanation to my endless questions. But he never let me out of his sight. Some time later, when I asked for a men’s room, he followed me upstairs to the door. Afterward, he gave me fresh gauze booties before we reentered the working areas.

At each stage, Luquel hovered close to make sure I did not write down the machine manufacturers’ names. It was a pointless precaution. Valrhona relies on the usual suspects for crucial steps, the old-faithful German equipment I had seen often before.

Beans are roasted in G. W. Barth rotary pods, only 240 kilos at a time to ensure even distribution of heat. Roasting takes twenty-five to thirty minutes, and the temperature is kept near 100 degrees Centigrade (212 degrees Fahrenheit) to avoid any burned flavor. The grinder-huller is a lovely wood-sided French machine, an antique workhorse that no one could find if he wanted to copy Valrhona’s process. Blowers whisk away the husks, and a rise in temperature melts what is left.

After the beans are roasted, hulled, and ground, the liquefied nibs go into giant Buhler five-roll millers. These refine the cacao into chocolate, blending in cocoa butter, sugar, and soy lecithin. By the time the chocolate moves on, it is broken down to particles of about fifteen microns, the optimum size for maximizing flavor.

From the miller, chocolate in solid chunks moves up conveyor belts to Bouermeister conches, where it is liquefied again. Paddles gently stir the chocolate for up to seventy-two hours, slowly releasing volatile molecules, from acetic acid to any number of other compounds that affect taste. Finally, the chocolate is tempered—heated, then cooled within a precise range—and it is ready to eat.

Valrhona is good not because of the machines themselves but rather because of the care exercised in how they are put to use. And that is only part of it.

To start with, the plant is designed on the French chefs’ rigorous belief in forward motion and the separation of elements. In this general approach, each step follows the next in logical order. Raw materials move onward until they end up on a diner’s plate. Disparate ingredients are handled with extreme care. No decent chef, for instance, would dream of cutting vegetables and fish with the same knife. All of this is efficient, but it also prevents any accidental tainting of flavors.

At Valrhona, each section is isolated so that temperature and air circulation can be strictly controlled. Access is limited to people who have a job to do. Overhead conduits like giant blimps filter and evacuate air to avoid contamination that might turn to mold. These improvements involved costly retrofits at the old plant. The new factory, opened in 2004, was designed with elaborate attention to airflow.

Off to one side, twenty specialists in a laboratory constantly test samples for quality and purity. Production chains include metal detectors just in case some visitor’s turquoise bracelet manages to slip through the cracks.

Behind one enormous red door, signifying full quality alert, Valrhona makes its bonbons of ganache and praliné. For all the fancy equipment, the final touch is by human hand. I watched a small crew make palets d’or, both square and round, at the working end of a fifteen-meter-long wood-sided cooling tunnel. Each finished piece was topped with a waxed paper disk that stayed on for twenty-four hours, causing crystals in the chocolate to take on a rich gleaming sheen under the signature gold flecks.

Michel Chambert trundled a heavy metal cart past us, smiling to himself at some private thought. He laughed out loud when I told him French workers were not reputed to find such joy in their work. After thirty-one years, he was in charge of the enrobeuses that coated bonbons, and he had no plan to retire.

“It all comes down to the relationship people have to their jobs,” he said. “People like it here, and we like each other. We’re proud of what we make.” I asked if he had a favorite Valrhona product, and he was stuck for an answer. “I eat this stuff all day long, grabbing a piece here and there. I like it all.”

In an adjoining section, Marie-Noëlle Courtial sat by a conveyor belt that carried trays of freshly coated pralinés. With swift strokes of two flat forms embossed with different sets of patterns, she created complex geometric decorations on the gleaming chocolate. She had been on the job for thirty-two years and seemed to get a kick out of every fresh batch she sent down the line.

“Try one,” she said, handing over a small square as if she were offering Adam a forbidden apple.

In the end, Valrhona bonbons might not receive the same personal attention as those made by France’s best artisans, but I’d eat them anytime.

 

 

Valrhona is an odd duck for a corporate subsidiary. It was founded in 1924 by the father of Olivier Deloisy, who now owns La Chocolaterie de l’Opéra, a French company that sells products that are made to his specifications by Chocovic in the Catalonian mountains of Spain.

In 1984, Robert Linxe of La Maison du Chocolat mentioned Valrhona to his brother-in-law, Jean-Noel Bongrain. The small Rhone Valley chocolate maker was facing tough times. Perhaps it might be a good investment. Bongrain already had money in La Maison du Chocolat, which operated well without demanding his attention. He bought Valrhona as a wholly owned subsidiary.

These days, a group of sales managers and production experts run the company for Bongrain, making strategic decisions by joint consultation. They include both the people who create diehard loyalty from some professionals and those who make Valrhona an epithet among others.

In the early 1990s, Valrhona was still what the French call a franco-français company. There was business enough at home, and foreigners got its products only if they came to Tain l’Hermitage and banged hard enough on the door. Since 1995, however, annual sales have grown in the double digits. Permanent sales offices are scattered around the world, and business booms not only in the United States but also in Japan. Hardly anyone who loves quality chocolate, anywhere, fails to recognize that bright red thirty-degree triangle on Valrhona’s label.

Bernard Duclos, Valrhona’s man in North America, hopes for substantial growth, but he is wary. I mentioned to him what seemed to be a promising similarity. Until late in the 1990s, Americans paid little attention to olive oil, content to buy unexciting glop marketed by large companies with Italian names. Suddenly, sales of excellent small artisan brands soared as people discovered quality was worth the extra cost.

“It is different with chocolate,” Duclos replied, and he is probably right. “When people started talking about good olive oil, Americans had little prior reference. It was something new for them, and they were essentially starting fresh. Everybody has a strong idea of what chocolate should be, based on what they have known all of their lives.” That is, Hershey bars.

Valrhona is working hard at professional levels, betting that new tastes will filter downward to a wider public. Until 2002, the company ran a training center in a one-room schoolhouse near the plant. Now a gleaming new kitchen complex, with classrooms and laboratories, receives seven hundred chefs a year from around the world. They all pay, of course. Valrhona keeps a dozen full-time chefs and patissiers to demonstrate the art of chocolate, in Japan and Singapore as well as in the United States and Europe.

“The whole challenge now is for us to get bigger without losing our soul,” Luquel told me as we finished the tour. That seemed a fair enough assessment. But the company’s customers, even those who swallow hard before picking up the phone to place their orders, have a broader concern: They don’t want Valrhona to lose its taste.

 

 

The Valrhona product range runs heavily to chips and chunks for big-time bakers. But its real pride is a collection of origin-specific chocolates. These come in bricks or three-kilo packages of fèves (“beans”) for professionals. But they are also sold retail in bars wrapped in handsome labels.

Gran Couva, Valrhona says, was the first vintage domain chocolate on the market. That is like wine or olive oil from a single estate. Whether someone else was first does not really matter. The chocolate is terrific. It is made with 64 percent cacao, all trinitario grown at the Gran Couva plantation in Trinidad. Subtle notes of flowers build to a lingering sense of ripe jasmine.

But, like French vintners, Valrhona’s master tasters lean toward blends made up of different beans with varying but complementary characteristics. Unlike vintners, they might choose their components from geographically distinct regions. Only seldom do they mix vintages—years—as cacao beans rarely get better with age. Playing on the similarities rather than the differences, they label their special blends with the winemakers’ accolade, grand cru.

There is Manjari, a 64 percent blend of Madagascar cacao, which comes from strains of criollo and trinitario that found their way to the Indian Ocean centuries ago. Its slightly bitter bouquet has soft notes of berries and chokecherries, with a powerful burst of flavor early on and a long, rich finish. It stays near the top of Chloé’s A-list, and it goes into the palets d’or of many fine chocolatiers.

Late in 2002, after two years of tasting and debating at Tain l’Hermitage, Valrhona released Araguani. This blends two Venezuelan terroirs with different soils and climates: the breeze-blown Caribbean coast and the steamy Andean foothills. With the advent of this new offering Manjari lovers suddenly found their loyalties divided. chloé was smitten. Up front, she found mixed aromas of grapes with a bit of chestnut and a faint, sweet bouquet of honey. A second phase smoothed into something more like toasted bread that developed slowly, without sweetness. And at the end, slight acidity lingered for a long time, tickling the tongue. “It is extremely balanced, and it goes on and on,” she concluded. “I love it.”

I love it, too. But my own favorite may be Caraïbe, from Venezuelan trinitario. It is 66 percent cacao, but the beans are sweet and fruity, with a trace of roasted almond and coffee.

Then again, maybe my favorite is Guanaja, which is named for the island off Honduras where Columbus tossed cacao beans to the bottom of a canoe—unaware that the discovery of chocolate literally lay at his feet. With 70 percent cacao, it is a powerful blend of criollo and trinitario from coastal regions of Venezuela. It, too, has nuances of ripe fruits and fresh flowers, but with an exceptional bitterness.

Jivara is the one milk chocolate of the set, powered by strong hints of caramel, with 40 percent cacao from South American plantations. There are others, and, Valrhona asserts, there will be more.

 

 

For chocolate lovers, the Valrhona approach to public relations has turned out to be good news. In 1991, an affable Italian perfectionist named Alessio Tessieri visited the Tain l’Hermitage plant, along with his sister, Cecilia, and their mother. The family had a thriving business selling ingredients to Italian bakers. They wanted to handle Valrhona products and perhaps expand into making ganache and pralinés with Valrhona chocolate. It had taken them long months to arrange the appointment, and it did not start well.

“On the way in, we passed three Danes on their way out, with very long faces,” Alessio told me. The man who received them explained, with a derisive laugh, how the previous visitors had thought Denmark was capable of appreciating fine French chocolate. Soon enough, it was clear that Valrhona thought the same thing about Italy, represented by a twenty-eight-year-old upstart and his twenty-five-year-old sister, in the company of their mother.

Alessio was furious. Looking back, he has calmed a bit. “Now I can understand Valrhona’s business strategy, about not wanting to get into a small new market,” he said, with a slightly embarrassed chuckle. “But I suppose I reacted more with pride than with reason.”

Cecilia, however, still bristles as she recalls the meeting thirteen years later. “They told us that they did not think Italians were ready for their products, and they were not sure we could do them justice,” she said. “Right then and there, it was war.”

The family pooled all of its resources to start a company in the countryside east of Pisa. They called it Amedei, after Alessio and Cecilia’s grandmother, whom both describe as a woman of ironbound honor who would not have taken a French slur lightly.

Soon enough, they made their point. By 2004, Amedei was turning out only a hundred tons a year, but specialty importers fought over it. American taste makers discovered a range of excellent single-origin cacao, elegantly packaged. At ninety dollars a pound in some stores, it was perhaps the most expensive chocolate in America. “We are still looking for markets and slowly expanding,” Alessio said, “but in size, we’re really nothing. We’re still at the level of poetry.”

Enlightened visitors beat a path to Amedei’s door. Instead of barred gates, they found a colorful welcoming façade. Guests toured the old-style granite refiners and settled into comfortable chairs in a paneled den to sample as much as they could handle.

From the beginning, Alessio went on the road to locate premium beans while Cecilia stayed home and learned what to do with them. Both excelled. Their beautifully boxed chocolates caught on fast. Almost everyone’s favorites include the spicy Venezuelan Porcelana, made from criollo beans purchased at a source the Tessieris keep secret. I like their Madagascar chocolate, with notes of citrus ranging toward grapefruit and a crisp feel in the mouth that goes on and on. The Ecuador is earthier, with strong suggestions of black tobacco.

Although Alessio circled the equator for beans, he knew how to hit Valrhona where it hurt. He zeroed in on the tiny centuries-old Venezuelan coastal village of Chuao. The enclave, made up of descendants of freed African slaves, is reachable only by boat. Among the cacao cognoscenti, Chuao was referred to with the same reverence that wine lovers lavish on Romanée-Conti. But unlike Romanée-Conti, a tiny Burgundy vineyard that has had the same family ownership for centuries, Chuao is a collective of small planters who operate loosely as a group.

Chuao people are linked by a common heritage and led by elders who earn their respect. Each season, they amass their fermented beans and spread them out to dry in the sun on the village square by the old church. For most scientists who study the chemical reactions, this is the best drying method, provided it is done correctly. Moisture leaves the beans evenly, without changes brought on by extra heat.

For years, once the beans were dried and ready for the boat, Chuao growers sold the bulk of their crop to a single chocolate maker: Valrhona.

At first, the real story was an intriguing mystery. According to the Amedei camp, Alessio made his inroads by repeated visits and passionate lobbying. He spent months with Chuao producers to help them solve technical problems. He worried about their sick children. He bought baseball uniforms for the local team. And, most important, he agreed to pay a higher price for cacao. During 2002, according to this version of disputed history, Amedei locked up the Chuao supply—at least for the immediate future. That left Valrhona with only their stock from earlier years and beans acquired near enough to Chuao to carry the name.

Valrhona had a different story. As Luquel told it, Tessieri worked on a single malcontent in the group and convinced him to sell sixty sacks of beans. With this minimum input, Amedei had a legitimate certificate of origin and could not be attacked in court.

This was no simple mystery. To start with, there is a question over what constitutes Chuao cacao. Venezuelan labeling laws leave a wide margin for exporters to claim what they wish. Enforcement procedures have not been assiduous, what with a percolating revolution in Venezuela along with crippling general strikes.

The next valley over, Choroni, also produces an exceptionally good crop. Like Chuao, its trees still retain a great deal of their old criollo pedigree. And unlike Chuao, its more independent-minded producers are not bound by a cooperative tradition.

In all, actual production from in front of the Chuao village church might approach twenty tons of beans in a banner year; sometimes it is closer to seven tons. If you add up all the chocolate sold as Chuao by a dozen manufacturers, you find numbers exceeding fifty tons. This is like counting the people who claimed after the fact to have been members of the French Resistance during World War II. The number is impressive, but it is highly suspect.

An interesting part of the mystery was how different the two companies’ similar Chuao beans came out as finished chocolate. As all chocolatiers insist, raw material is only part of the picture. To supplement my own nose, I asked Chloé to give both versions her full-bore treatment, complete with unsullied early-morning palate and quiet room free of background noise. Then she reported her verdict: “Don’t make me choose.”

In the Amedei, she sensed an immediate note of burnt caramel, but with a pleasantly consistent overall texture. An early hint of leather evolved into licorice and grapes. In the second stage—that is, the cruising speed after initial acceleration—she felt a slight acidity that enhanced the licorice, leading toward an end-of-mouth sensation of wild mushrooms.

“It is extremely intense and masculine, intense but exciting, with strong complexity and yet harmony,” Chloé reported. “I can picture a young, beautiful man, full of fire, the kind that Pier Paolo Pasolini liked in his films.”

The Valrhona, in contrast, came on sweet with an agreeable fatty sensation that suggested more cocoa butter. Though not as strong as Amedei at first, it built quickly to a bouquet of dried plums and aromatic wood. She found it much more harmonious, mild, and balanced.

“This time,” Chloé said, “I see another man, still masculine but without that same rebellious wild side. They are totally different. Put them both on my island.”

There were other Chuao versions as well. François Pralus produced what he called a pure Chuao, although he was cagey about his source of beans. His label described it as “full of finesse, with notes of spices, soft tobacco, lightly smoked, a powerful nose, bitter with a lingering flavor.” But he summed that all up in a single word that did not appear on the bright fuchsia label: “Leather.” I had noted the same. It suggested nothing so strongly as a hard-ridden saddle.

But in mid-2004, there was no more choice to make. The Chuao producers’ cooperative settled the issue with letters not only to Valrhona but also to Pralus and other European chocolate makers who used their name. Chuao cacao, they declared, went only to Amedei.

I visited the Tessieris soon after that registered letter reached its various destinations. When I mentioned the victory, Alessio tried hard not to smirk. His boyish round face was too expressive for him to pull it off.

Cecilia, who was focused on her own world in Amedei’s small and immaculate production plant, did a better job of it. Her smirk was evident only when she spoke of blind-tasting panels that reported a marked preference for her Toscano blend, with 70 percent cacao content, over anything Valrhona had to offer.

“I just started working, learning every way I could,” Cecilia said. “I thought if someone else can do it, why can’t I? After working for hours in the lab, I started to like it, and I was proving a woman could do the work. Alessio is a man—he can go tromping around plantations. I’m happy here in the factory.” A throaty chuckle suggested she was probably just as able as her brother to negotiate with cacao traders. But then, she also had a husband and two small sons besides all that chocolate.

Over time, Cecilia narrowed her range to a dozen types of chocolate. Her Toscano blends came in cacao content of 70 percent, 66 percent, and 63 percent, each different in composition and taste. Because more sugar went into the 63 percent blend, she found elements of bitter tannin to balance the sweetness. She designed her robust 70 percent to linger in the mouth, with no sharp peak, releasing sensations of fruits and flowers.

“This melts easily, and you can feel it as it reaches each of your sensory passages,” she said of her prized 70 percent. I nodded in happy agreement, as each of my sensory passages checked in. “It is very elegant. For me, this is about the limit. People like to experiment with high percentages, but even 80 percent is too much for me. You need the sugar.”

Cecilia made a dark Chuao exclusively from Alessio’s treasured beans and another version with milk. The others in her range were from blends of South American, Caribbean, and Madagascar beans.

Besides pure chocolate, Cecilia developed a line of two dozen bonbons, some flavored with such Italian specialties as amaretto, grappa, vin santo, and torrone. But her treasure among them was a selection of six different Meditazione (Meditation) chocolates.

I zeroed in on Radici (Roots), a rhubarb-infused rectangle of dark couverture. With a goofy smile, I reached for a second. As it turned out, that was also one of Cecilia’s favorites. “When I was a kid, I loved candies with rhubarb in them, and I had to satisfy myself,” she explained.

Next I tried Scintelle (Sparks), an innocent-looking palet d’or. As advertised, it produced tiny flashes of a flavor it takes a moment to recognize. By the time I realized it was licorice—not anything I would have considered in chocolate—I had decided I liked it. A lot.

Then I suited up in gauze cap, paper robe, and booties for a tour of her domain. She uses the tried-and-true old Swiss and German equipment I had come to recognize, including round G. W. Barth roasters. Beans are ground to a fineness of twelve microns to ensure smooth texture. At the end, mechanical arms gently massage the finished chocolate for seventy-two hours in traditional conches. The simple little operation has one clear similarity to Valrhona: People seem to be very happy at their jobs.

“We’re really proud of what we do here, and we want people to know about it,” she said. “If anyone calls with a question or a problem, they get me directly on the phone. We want to be that kind of company.”

Alessio is harder to find. While Cecilia makes chocolate, he is often gone, working on his cacao network. He has found suppliers in the Caribbean—on Grenada, Trinidad, and Jamaica—and in Madagascar. But he keeps going back to Venezuela, where, beyond Chuao, both Valrhona and Amedei have invested heavily.

“Venezuela clearly has the best potential,” he said, “but it is a lot of work. Post-harvest management can be very, very bad, and can destroy top-quality beans. From the moment you crack open a pod, it all depends on management. There are mysterious factors at play, traditions to respect. In Chuao, only the women are allowed to dry the beans.”

Alessio ensures that shipping containers are less than full to better control humidity. Beans are roasted as quickly as possible, although under proper conditions, cacao can be safely stored for a long time.

And then, of course, it is Venezuela. Strikes, banditry, and the vagaries of public administration all make an impact. Sometimes Colombian cacao of undetermined origin is smuggled across the border.

“For these reasons, we are planting our trees, to be freer, and we keep three agronomists working all the time to improve quality,” Alessio said. He does not say where in Venezuela he has bought plantations. But his interest is clear. He spends much of his time in the rich forests south of Lake Maracaibo, where most of that priceless Porcelana originates.

To satisfy a much larger appetite for beans, Valrhona has also invested in Venezuelan plantations, as it has elsewhere along the equator. Valrhona works through a local affiliate known as Socaoven. Its director, a Venezuelan named Cai Rosenberg, operates in a climate of voracious middlemen and fierce competition.

During 2002, someone peppered Rosenberg’s car with automatic gunfire. He was struck by half a dozen bullets, but by some miracle, none damaged a vital organ. His wife was also wounded. The assailant is still unknown, and the attack could have been for any number of reasons. But a point was clearly made. Even for the silk-tied Rhone Valley French bourgeoisie who market genteel sweetness, chocolate is serious business.

 

 

Valrhona is less worried about small competitors such as Amedei or Domori, farther up the Italian coast, than about the looming presence of Barry Callebaut.

Before assorted corporate takeovers and then a merger at the hands of a Swiss magnate named Klaus Jacob, Cacao Barry in France and Callebaut in Belgium made some very good chocolate. With sales approaching a million tons of product a year, Barry Callebaut AG turns out a great deal of mediocrity. Yet even with the new corporate structure, elements of the loosely linked company still make fine high-quality chocolate. Many Belgian craftsmen continue to swear by Callebaut products their grandfathers loved. A lot of Frenchmen still prefer something different from the Valrhona taste and style.

The Swiss-based company is in a position to get better if the market demands it. Jacob, balding and bespectacled with no direct heirs, clearly thinks about his legacy. In a sketch accompanying its international list of billionaires, Forbes said Jacob aspired to be a new Andrew Carnegie. He has given nearly a billion dollars to charitable causes in developing countries. And more is coming in. During 2004, the company’s sales and profits were growing at double-digit annual rates. It made chocolate in thirty plants located in seventeen countries, with an annual turnover of about 3.6 billion Swiss francs.

At the obligatory lunch, which, in France, must follow a hard morning of chocolate tasting, Luquel was frank about Valrhona’s fears. “They’ve got all the money they need, and we’re their only target,” he said. “When someone like that comes after you, it is wise to take note.”

Few chocolate professionals expect Barry Callebaut to make a serious dent in Valrhona, even if the Swiss giant manages to curb its small rival’s rate of growth. The best chocolatiers and pâtissiers think beyond price when they seek a specific taste. Barry Callebaut’s huge advertising budget may influence the broader public, but it is hardly likely to sway professionals who know what they like.

In the end, fierce competition could turn out to be a happy blessing. So much the better if Barry Callebaut creates more fine chocolate on earth. And for those seeking a higher level, more charm among Valrhona’s directors in Tain l’Hermitage should make it easier to get past the Pearly Gates.