SWITZERLAND, AND BEYOND
In Geneva, I had what seemed like a fine idea. I wanted to find the best of those artisan Swiss chocolatiers everyone talked about but could never identify, so I went to see Pasquale De Cesare. He was retiring after forty years as the resourceful concierge of the Geneva InterContinental hotel. He had never steered me wrong.
Without a moment’s reflection, Pasquale wrote down a name and an address. “This man,” he assured me with a confident smile, “is the best you’ll find.” To double-check, I sought advice from his nighttime colleague, who had spent three decades at the job. His response was the same. And just for good measure, I tried the first cabbie I could find who had not grown up in North Africa.
The address, once fashionable, was deep in the peep-show district. I had reached the owner by telephone at his lab, and he offered to meet me at the shop. He showed up as promised, moving slowly on a cane. He was ninety. His sons helped out, but he put in a full day’s work.
I desperately wanted to like this kind old man’s chocolate. He talked about it soulfully, recounting the long years he had spent in the business since the end of World War II. When I asked to try his favorite, he produced what he called his “summer special.” It was a
lumpy truffle with a curious cloying feel on the palate. With pride, he explained how he used vegetable fat so the chocolate did not melt during warm months. The couverture was from one of those big Swiss industrial plants Wittamer had spoken about. It was not worth writing home about.
After some more pleasant conversation, I left with profuse thanks. On the way out, I paused to talk to a young couple from New York. They were both exulting in the presence of so much Swiss chocolate.
“Chocolate doesn’t get any better,” the man had told the woman. I horned in to ask why he thought so. “It’s Swiss,” he said. “Everyone knows they make the best.” The woman nodded. I asked them if they had sampled anything from France. Neither knew the French made chocolate.
Good artisan Swiss chocolatiers exist, even if they are now hard to find. They still make some sweet milk chocolate from contented cows munching herbs and high grass in Alpine meadows. That image, however, is part of a reality that died long ago. Fortunately for Switzerland, most of us have yet to catch on.
Eventually, in the mountains near Zurich, I found Max Felchlin AG, which turned out to be one of my favorite chocolate factories anywhere. But it was not easy.
The Swiss pay a high price for their economic and political independence, as well as the social safety net that protects them from cradle to crypt. If Heidi still lugged overflowing milk pails in the shadow of the Matterhorn, her employer would be saddled with payroll taxes and a massive load of paperwork. Handmade chocolate requires costly pairs of hired hands.
Switzerland still leads the charts in chocolate consumption. According to statistics compiled in 2000 by Belgian researchers and distributed by the American Chocolate Manufacturers Association, the Swiss consumed 22.36 pounds per capita, followed by the Austrians at 20.13, the Irish at 19.47, and the Germans at 18.04. The British, Norwegians,
and Danes fell in the range of 17 pounds. Belgians came further behind, at 13.16, followed by Australians and then Swedes.
Americans’ per capita chocolate consumption was 11.64, just over half the Swiss figure. The French came just behind, at 11.38. Italians averaged only 6.13 pounds.
Such comparative figures require a bit of scrutiny. To begin with, researchers tally “chocolate confections” and not the main ingredient itself. Also, while the Swiss buy a lot of their singular style of chocolate, many purchases are by foreign visitors dazzled by an old reputation that refuses to wither away. But there is more to it than that. In these globalized times, it is hard to know what’s in a number.
Barry Callebaut is headquartered in Switzerland, owned by the Swiss industrialist Klaus Jacob. But most of its chocolate is made elsewhere. Kraft Foods also shows up on the chart, with brands that originate in Switzerland.
Nestlé’s catalogue of European chocolate offers such Italian hallmarks as Perugina and those dark chocolate hazelnut kisses, Baci. And, of course, After Eight mints. Although Nestle is Swiss, its production is heavily farmed out to European Union countries where wages are lower and trade barriers have all but disappeared.
Long before the European Union adopted the euro as its common currency and expanded to twenty-five member nations in 2004, Switzerland was finding itself out in the cold.
In 1995, Nestle launched a new chocolate bar with great fanfare but then had to manufacture it in Spain and Greece. The following year, Dario Kuster, director of the Swiss chocolate makers’ association, Chocosuisse, told The Washington Post: “Step by step, Swiss chocolate production is dislocated outside Switzerland.” Subsequent events have proven him right.
It is hard enough to track chocolate production still located within the country. While Switzerland has let some light into its once opaque banking secrecy, Swiss chocolate is still a murky subject. It is not illegal for manufacturers and artisan chocolatiers to divulge secrets. However, little is as it seems.
Today, wonderful chocolate is sold in Zurich and its environs at Confiserie Sprüngli. This sounds as if it is part of the large international group Chocoladefabriken Lindt & Sprüngli. And it once was. Soon after David Sprüngli opened his first confectionery shop in 1836, he went into the confectionery business with Rodolphe Lindt. But, heading separate ways, the families split in 1892. Sprüngli’s sons wanted a retail business, where Zurich society could while away pleasant afternoons. The Lindts, inventors and industrialists, went big-time. Now Lindt & Sprüngli is a publicly traded chocolate empire based in Bern. To make things confusing, no one has since decided to change the old name.
“I suppose we just never felt the need,” Tomas Prenosil, Sprüngli’s thirty-eight-year-old chief executive officer, told me. Though originally a Czech, he left Prague after the tumultuous spring of 1968, and his brother married a Sprüngli daughter. “Maybe we’ll get around to it one of these days.” But there seemed to be no particular hurry. Confiserie Sprüngli buys most of its liquid chocolate base from Lindt & Sprüngli.
No one who looks closely is likely to confuse the two companies. Sprüngli has only seventeen shops, including an outlet at Zurich Airport, but none of them are far enough away for cream to lose freshness in the back of a truck. Geneva, for instance, at four hours on the freeway, is too long a ride. Only the family is involved in decisions. “When we sit down for a board meeting, there are only five of us,” Prenosil said.
Company headquarters are up the stairs above a stately, squat Zuricher-style building on Paradeplatz. Across the courtyard, a lovingly tended museum contains century-old ledgers, original molds, and some of the early hardware the Lindts and Sprünglis used to pioneer chocolate making. But the action is at street level, where shoppers cram into the ornate confiserie. Counters display everything from gravitydefying, mouthwatering chocolate cakes to sliced cold cuts for sandwiches. It is still the sort of place David Sprüngli must have imagined.
Before I left, Prenosil wrapped up a luscious-looking dark lump dusted with cocoa powder. It was, he said, the fresh-cream truffe du
jour, and he insisted that it be eaten before the day’s end. Talk about needless advice.
Lindt & Sprüngli’s products are easier to find. For instance, it maintains a spacious shop on Fifth Avenue in New York, across from Tiffany’s and next to all the fancy European luxury-brand outlets. The company’s founding date, 1845, is featured prominently, and repeatedly, all across the colorful showroom. Historical displays recall Rodolphe Lindt, whose invention of the conche freed chocolate from its grainy texture and less attractive flavor elements.
As in most such high-end Fifth Avenue shops, the staff is pleasant and eager to help. “These are delicious,” I heard one woman tell a customer, offering a sugary pink and white concoction from a large cacaoless display. When I explained my purpose, the woman asked if I would like to taste a new specialty bar of 85 percent chocolate. I said I did. She broke off a piece of the same Lindt chocolate in familiar packages offered in supermarkets from the Bronx to the backstreets of Kyoto. It was perfectly good, with no excitement to it.
For me, Lindt can be one of best price-per-pound items in anybody’s supermarket. It is clean and consistent. A new milk chocolate praline bar Lindt brought out in 2003 is better than some artisan attempts in fancy small shops. But it is mass-market chocolate, with all the limitations of bigness. Its range for innovation is limited. Its raw materials must come in bulk. Its product must taste roughly the same year after year, although cacao, like grapes and olives, does not grow that way.
I asked the saleswoman if she had something more particular to the shop, perhaps a signature piece that was only chocolate without filling. She shook her head and replied, “I don’t think we have anything like that.” Poking around on my own, I found a plate of small flat rectangles next to a card reading, “Lindt’s Signature Chocolate.”
It was good sweet chocolate, the kind hoteliers put on pillows all over Switzerland. No particular taste pushed ahead of any other. Not much lingered on the tongue. I would recommend it to any milk chocolate
fiend in need of a dose. But it hardly bore the dignity of 160 years. And Lindt & Sprüngli seemed like a curious fit as a Fifth Avenue specialty shop.
The old Swiss company was doing well. In 2003, despite a drop in tourism because of the Iraq war and the deadly SARS virus, the company reported sales of 1.8 billion Swiss francs. That is more than a billion dollars, a 7.8 percent increase over 2002.
Clearly, it suits tastes in the United States. During 2004, Cook’s Illustrated magazine organized a blind tasting for seventy-five American food editors at its Boston headquarters. The editors ranked ten dark chocolates. The fabled French grand cru entries were skunked. Valrhona’s Manjari ranked only sixth, followed by its Guanaja. Scharffen Berger’s Semisweet came first, but Lindt’s Excellence was third. That would be a decent-enough showing for industrial chocolate. But the second-place chocolate was Ghirardelli Bittersweet. That old landmark San Francisco company is owned by Lindt & Sprüngli.
Just as with giant banks that used to be private clubs or industrial watchmakers who were once corner jewelry shops, Swiss confectioners have moved to a different plane. The goal is no longer handmade innovation but rather a reliable final product of absolute consistency, with skillful quality control over all ingredients. The Swiss can certainly handle that.
But then there is Max Felchlin AG in the lakeside town of Schwyz. By the time I got there, toward the end of my research, I had given up the idea of picking chocolate for a desert island. I would need a refrigerated freighter floating offshore. But, if pressed to the wall, it would be hard to give up Felchlin’s Maracaibo.
The little factory produces about twenty-five hundred tons a year, including a Grand Cru line made with select South American and African beans. But it steadfastly sticks to its founder’s policy of focusing on wholesale supply to professionals who make finished products under their own name. Sprüngli, for example.
When I visited Tomas Prenosil, he told me he used a lot of Felchlin
chocolate, heaping praise on its taste and quality. It is the only non-Lindt base he uses. Later, Mary Scarvalone, the artist whose drawings enliven these chapters, asked a friend passing through Zurich Airport to pick up some examples of Sprüngli products made with Felchlin chocolate. The clerk was miffed. Sprüngli, she declared, used only Sprüngli chocolate.
Even today, Max Felchlin AG seems like a miniature Milton Hershey vision set in genteel surroundings. Max Josef Felchlin set up shop in 1908 as an importer of honey. Soon after, he began making chocolate. The founder’s official portrait looks modeled for a hundred-franc note: ruddy and determined with a furrowed brow, a modest mustache, and perfectly clipped iron-gray hair. All in all, he seemed the personification of received ideas about old Switzerland. He is remembered as a good man who took care of workers, a man of culture who collected paintings and sculpture that give his old family complex—now company headquarters—the air of a landscaped art museum.
Felchlin proclaimed his watchwords, from Goethe, in an inscription over the stately entryway: “Der Geist, aus dem wir Handeln, ist das Höchste.” Supreme is the spirit from which we act.
The last family member, Suzanne Felchlin, died in 2004 at the age of eighty. But the old man had thought ahead. He set up a foundation of trusted friends from Schwyz to be the majority owner. And Christian Aschwanden, chief executive officer since 1992, safeguards the old philosophy: to make the best chocolate possible for chefs, bakers, patissiers, and confectioners.
“Our role is to support these people who maintain their own high standards,” Aschwanden explained, in his elegant dark-wood office overlooking handsome gardens. “We don’t want to hide ourselves. We are here to tell people what we do. But we want to support top-notch chefs and others who work with chocolate. And we do not want to compete with our customers.”
This enforced humility has no visible impact on Sepp Schoenbachler, a pear-shaped, balding Felchlin manager with a serious mien whose eyes nonetheless gleam whenever he says the word chocolate. When I first called and mentioned my intended trip, and he replied, “No worries,”
I knew I was in good hands. He was the perfect composite, a meticulous Swiss engineer with enough adventure in him to go hang out in Australia and bring back a bride.
Sepp joined the company in 1999 after a varied career in food technology. Like Cecilia Tessieri at Amedei, he came at chocolate peripherally and learned about it by spending days on end working through mistakes. His colleague goes off scouting for superior beans. His job is to get the most out of them.
Soon after Sepp’s initial experiments, Felchlin dropped a bomb on the tidy community of Swiss industrial chocolatiers. Sepp followed orders to make the best chocolate possible; he soon learned the value of single-origin beans. He found that superior cacao could be pushed to new limits of roasting and milling, producing exciting new flavors. Each type of cacao reacted differently, requiring altered nuances of time and temperature. This was nothing new to French pioneers already working in this direction. But in Switzerland, it was revolution.
When Felchlin began to label the origin of cacao in its fine specialty products, big industrial companies howled in protest.
“They were furious, and several threatened to sue us for breaking the sacred Swiss tradition of secrecy,” Sepp said, with a chuckle. “They called us traitors and demanded to know how we could do such a thing.” But the only secret the big companies were protecting, he added, was that they were using cheaper bulk beans. After a while, the large companies decided that joining the new trend was far more useful than fighting it.
Felchlin’s adventure into quality, like Amedei’s war with Valrhona and other such developments in the United States as well as in Europe, signaled a sea change for cacao growers around the equator. While the overwhelming demand was still for containers of nameless beans traded on the London and New York exchanges, a new market was fast developing for “flavor beans” of known parentage.
Big companies such as Lindt & Sprungli soon got into the act. It was no longer enough for buyers to beat the bushes for the handful of producers who grew fine cacao under optimum conditions. Old plantations would have to be revived, and new ones established. Countries
such as Vietnam and Indonesia, which had only dabbled in cacao, saw fresh opportunity. The impact on price would not be clear for years. But one eventual result seemed likely: Chocolate makers who looked for better cacao would find it.
Sepp’s most crucial early lesson was that even the best cacao is no more than raw material. It does not guarantee good chocolate any more than 18-karat gold assures beautiful jewelry without skilled hands to work it. Gold, in fact, can be melted down for another try.
“It is so easy to ruin cacao, or to waste it,” Sepp said, recounting the experiments that brought him to that conclusion. He had spent months on end experimenting with roasting times, heat levels, grind adjustments, and speeds. Steam heat has a different effect than hot water. As molten chocolate cools, the temperature curve is crucial.
“Every bean has its own characteristics which reveal themselves in a rainbow, and you have to work to bring out each color,” he said. “The big companies use such huge amounts that they must emphasize production, not quality. They can only run the beans through and castrate them.”
As Sepp talked, his stolid Swiss side faded, and yet more Aussie pervaded his fluent English.
“You have to know whether the bean produces hard or soft cocoa butter,” he said. “Everything matters. Certain beans may look like nothing special, but if you understand them and can work with them, maybe there is a good surprise. It’s like an old house. Some people can say it’s ugly and walk away. But if you take out some walls, put in a window, suddenly it is beautiful.”
For a while, Sepp veered back into technology. He was lyrical again. “In good cacao, there are maybe seven hundred different elements that have to do with flavor,” he said. “You have to move slowly, carefully, to try to discover as many as you can. If you go too fast, you simply trample all the flowers.”
As we spoke, we headed into the barnlike heart of the factory, sparkling clean as most chocolate plants are everywhere. Sepp talked and waved his arms as we moved from stage to stage.
As usual, beans begin the process with cleaning, in a great rattling and clouds of dust. That is where the old nails and bullet cartridges
drop off the line. But Felchlin then steams them to kill bacteria, sterilizing them hundreds of times more thoroughly than Swiss food laws stipulate. From there, they go the ball-shaped Barth roasters, the crushers, and the winnowers. The mélangeurs blend the ground nibs with cocoa butter, sugar, and maybe milk powder, working the mixture until it is pasty chocolate. After that, trusty Buhler five-roll millers refine it to a smooth molten mix.
I had seen a lot of variations of this before, and Sepp had a destination in mind. He flung aside some plastic curtains and announced, “These are my babies.”
When he first took the job, Sepp fell in love with Felchlin’s museum-worthy longitudinal conches. Each was the same sort of crude apparatus—the Langschieber, or “long shover”—that Rodolphe Lindt had developed. Four of them stood in a row, working away, long troughs with massive oblong arms pushing paddles back and forth in the chocolate. Jules Verne might have imagined them as prototype robots. Each machine handled 200 kilos, only 440 pounds, at a time.
Felchlin also used more modern conches, but Sepp chose these for the good stuff, massaging his best chocolate for seventy-two hours at temperatures and speeds he watched with zeal.
As I had come to learn, every chocolate master has his personal obsession. With Claudio Corallo in São Tome, it is roasting. He believes that if beans are good enough, too much conching works them to death. But he likes his chocolate real, full of strong flavor and slightly gritty. With Sepp, it is getting a conche to remove just the right nasty volatile components without losing the good ones.
“Everyone told me these old machines could not handle chocolate with greater than fifty-five percent cacao,” he said. “For three days, I slept next to these things.” When he produced a smooth and flavorful Madagascar chocolate at 64 percent, he had a factory full of believers.
Then he began to push other limits and try new things. He made two batches of chocolate for Japanese buyers using the same beans and same refining process. Because he made minor changes at the end, one batch had a completely different taste from the other.
As experiments into new levels of quality began to show results, directors
made a strategic decision. It was likely what Max Josef Felchlin would have done.
“There is no way we can do the same things as Lindt and survive,” Sepp explained. “We did not want to do what big companies did. Instead, we decided to go back to our roots. We want to focus on what is really good.”
The one obvious direction was the dark side. Enough companies catered to the Swiss penchant for sweet milk chocolate. Felchlin still made their run-of-the-mill ingredients for bakers and patissiers. But it also introduced its small Grand Cru line. And the star of it, for me, is that rich and lively Maracaibo.
As the name suggests, the beans come from south of Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo, in the region where Amedei gets its Porcelana. This is an early cradle of criollo, and much of the old strains remain. Felchlin classes its Maracaibo as bittersweet, at 65 percent cacao content. Tasting it again and again, I found little to dispute the company’s own description: “The well-balanced combination of coffee and plum aroma enhances the distinct cocoa flavor. The traditional gentle processing method unfolds the aromas of orange blossom and cinnamon which convey … a festive character, enhanced with a light sweet raisin bouquet leading to a long final sensation.”
Such descriptions by chocolate makers are of varied utility. Some are no more than wishful thinking and poetry. Others reflect thoughtful deliberation by panels of skilled specialists who commune with their taste buds and olfactory senses. If you pay attention, and sample a chocolate before your morning coffee and cigarette, it is amazing how many of these notes make themselves plain. And even if they don’t, good chocolate is worth the effort.
Felchlin makes this easier with a clever reference tool in the form of a wheel, developed with Swiss university researchers. It has an inner circle of seven categories: vegetable, flowery, fruity, roasted, nutty, spicy, and miscellaneous. Each has a further breakdown. “Miscellaneous,” for instance, takes in tobacco, butter, cream/milk, bread, honey, and beeswax. Fruity might be apricot preserves, currant preserves, red berries, orange, dried fruit, dried plums, dried bananas, and wild berries.
The idea is to start with chocolate with low cacao content and work upward. Your first clues come with a deep sniff, and by breaking off a bit to feel the texture. Rubbing the chocolate between your thumb and forefinger warms it, releasing volatile aroma components. With the first bite, you notice the snap. As the chocolate melts on your tongue, layers of flavors develop. Hold your breath a moment and exhale through the nose. This all takes some practice, and it is not high science. But it is wonderful.
In my last meeting with Aschwanden, it seemed as if Sepp’s enthusiasm had scored a point. Perhaps, he said, Felchlin might package a line of chocolate bars available directly to the public. But only, he added, through confectionery shops.
If Switzerland was the early heartland of chocolate, today’s variations have gone a long way beyond their origins. Excellent chocolate might be found almost anywhere. So might weird novelties. The kosher bars and bonbons offered by Chocolaterie Damyel in Sarcelles, near Paris, are straightforward enough. But what about the Ukrainian candy company in Kiev that offers finger-sized sticks of congealed pork fat in dark chocolate?
And then there is that intriguing Russian chocolate I kept seeing at every turn. From the fancy food shows in America to that little gathering outside of Brussels, I noticed a small booth offering bars marked “Product of Russia.” Its logo was imposing: an elegant cursive K on a rich burgundy field, under a regal crown, over the woodcut name on a cocoa-brown panel that might have graced the bow of a nineteenth-century ship: A. Korkunov.
Discreet letters at the top promised “High Quality, Refined Taste,” and thirty-point script characters proclaimed what was inside: “Dark Chocolate.” Curiosity overcame me, and I read the literature stacked up at the booth.
After the Soviet Union imploded, a young military officer named Andrei Korkunov, with thirty dollars in his pocket, turned hustler in the new anything-goes Russia. He tried his hand at just about everything.
Blue jeans paid off no better than did pig iron. One day, a cashs-trapped Czech wheeler-dealer paid him for a shipment of computers with three containers of chocolate.
“It was better than nothing,” he recalled for the Moscow Times in 2001, when he was thirty-eight. When his mystery chocolate was snapped up overnight by cacao-starved Russians, he thought big. He designed an old-style coat of arms reminiscent of czarist days. And in 1999, he launched A. Korkunov Chocolatier.
“Many think Korkunov is a bearded old man,” he told the Russian newspaper. A portrait showed him as a well-fed young mogul in a dark tie, with a stern businessman gaze. “People think I’m a descendant of some historic nobleman.” By then, two years into the business, many Russians were already calling him the Chocolate King.
Because they were used to tolerating Soviet-made chocolate that might be confused with soap, Russians wolfed down Korkunov’s offerings. He bought Italian machinery, hired Italian bonbon makers he found in Moscow, and acquired beans from somewhere. When a collapsed ruble put imported chocolate beyond anyone’s reach, he spurred production.
By 2004, Korkunov had built a second plant that was one and a half times as big as his original quarters. He set up an American beachhead in Englewood, New Jersey, selling across much of the United States. He did not look far for his English-language sales pitch: “From Russia with Love.”
From a few thousand tons a year, Korkunov increased production to more than six thousand tons, with a turnover of $45 million, and big plans to keep going. His Italian-style bonbons are heavy on hazelnuts and praline filling. One, of course, is named Criollo. The 72 percent bar has a quirky taste that Korkunov boasted was addictive. Once you try it, he told the Moscow Times, you will never want anything else.
I tried it, and I wanted something else. It had a metallic taste and a synthetic feel, with a gummy texture and an astringency that pushed aside other nuances. But it certainly looked like it might be good.