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When the feeling finally began to subside I opened my eyes and started looking for the man responsible
HIS NAME WAS Volker Lehmann and he was the only reason Cru Sauvage existed Before I'd even tasted the chocolate I'd gleaned the basic elements of the story from the folks at Felchlin: Agronomist enters Bolivian rainforest and makes startling discovery Volker was the visionary connoisseur on the ground in the shit Felchlin was just smart enough to recognize what he'd found The company invested in specialized equipment began production and brought the first fruits of Volker's labor to the European gourmet market in small quantities in 2005 It was three years before I heard of it
After my own chocolate enlightenment Ihad to know more It wasn't easy making contact with Volker but once I did he told me he was just scratching the surface Demand greatly exceeded supply and there was much much more out there He was planning a trip to Bolivia's Río Grande a remote tributary of the Amazon that it was said held vast chocolatales as the forests of wild cacao are called There he would visit the Amazonian tribespeople who lived along the banks offer them employment as cacao gatherers and eventually he hoped set up jungle processing stations in their villages Did I want to tag along
Yeah I was in
Six frustrating months later on the other side of a series of false starts logistical snafus tropical deluges and cruel vaccinations I finally met the bald athletic 53-year-old in the jungle city of Santa Cruz Bolivia From there we hopped on a 16-seater to Trinidad a swampy town with frogs trilling in the crumbling gutters It was early March the tail end of the rainy season; the rivers had risen 30 feet and spilled across the forests Trees stood in six feet of water Piranhas had abandoned the river channels for better hunting in the woods
To get within a reasonable distance of the indigenous settlement of Combate a purported cacao hot spot on the Río Grande we opted for a one-hour $400 bush-plane ride instead of a four-day boat trip Every landing strip along the river was underwater except one near an abandoned hunting lodge As we approached our pilot a squat mustachioed Bolivian of few words pointed and shook his head in sad disgust It was unsettlingly overgrown Down on the river two men in a dugout canoe waited We swooped down for an inspection andgood God he was landing in that stuff Death smirked at me: All for a goddamned chocolate bar But we punched into the brush and came to an amazingly soft stop
I gave our (sad disgusted) pilot two happy thumbs-up hopped out and landed on the home of some warlike ant tribe which opened up a can of whup-ass on my sandaled foot As he stood watching me do the first of many ant dances Volker smiled thinly and said in Teutonic tones "Welcome to the Amazon If you stay we eat you"
WILD CACAO A MYTH disappeared ages ago extinctthat's what my industry sources had said anyway Chocolate is made by fermenting drying roasting and grinding the almond-size fruit seeds of Theobroma cacao which has been farmedand therefore much changed by humansfor thousands of years The ancestors of the Maya perfected the process in Mesoamerica and it was later passed on to the Aztecs In the 16th century conquistador chronicles tell us the Maya were cultivating vast cacao orchards throughout the Yucatán and Chiapas It was thoroughly domesticated Until recent genetic testing proved that the tree is actually native to Amazonia many scholars believed it hailed from the Maya homelands
Cacao was used as both drink and currency by the Maya: Ten beans got you a rabbit or a prostitute When Hernán Cortés entered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1519 he found nearly a million cacao beans in Montezuma's coffers Liquid chocolate played the role of blood in some Aztec rituals involving human sacrifice The cacao pod seems to have reminded the priests of the heart
The Spanish didn't quite get chocolate until they learned to mix it with sugar and by the 17th century Europe was cuckoo for cacao The groves of Central America and southern Mexico couldn't keep up Enter Brazil where an inferior variety was being farmed Though this cacao was higher-yielding and more disease resistant it was also bitter as hell so they cut it with lots of sugar Europeans never knew the difference Neither do you The finer-flavored domesticated cacao of the Maya was long ago abandoned so crappy Brazilian cacaofarmed primarily in Africa these daysis all most of us have ever known
Ninety-five percent of chocolate is made with "bulk beans" meaning they taste like shit If you think dark chocolate is bitter and nasty blame the bulk beans The tiny supply of good domesticated stufffrom makers like Valrhona Scharffen Berger and Amanocomes from old cultivars grown mostly in remote corners of the Americas on farms that were never able to afford the switch to modern high-yield varieties
All of this I knew from researching gourmet chocolate for my book American Terroir Then I stumbled upon the Cru Sauvage Its wild cacao had always been harvested like any other fruit by the indigenous tribes but it had never been shipped out of the country before just hauled to Trinidad by middlemen in poor condition and sold on the domestic market While working in the Bolivian Amazon as a consultant in 1991 Volker filed a report on the great potential he saw in the wild cacao It was roundly ignored He would later leave the idiots to their bureaucracy and pursue his vision alone
Uh-huh I thought I've heard this story before courtesy of Joseph Conrad: German guy hops on a boat heads deep into the jungle and then sends some freaky communiques before going rogue Well if Volker was Kurtz I figured I was Marlow fated to tell his story
DANTE WAS OUR GUIDEa very inauspicious name it seemed Volker and I climbed into his dugout and he yanked its outboard to life steering us between curtains of endless rainforest Combate lay three hours downstream It was cl
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running up and down the river I began to feel really really good It could have been the jaw-dropping wildlife and the sweet clean tropical air but it was probably the big fat wad of coca leaves in my cheek
The sacred plant of Bolivia coca is chewed by most of the indigenous population and Dante seemed to have an eternal quid of it in his maw so I'd asked for a little I stuffed the dried leaves inside my cheek added a smear of baking soda to start the chemical reaction and let the alkaloids slowly ooze into my bloodstream First my tongue and cheek went numb then things began to occur to me One was that there is no better way to float down the Amazon than on the wings of a mild coca high Another was that it's a crying shame that cocaine a superconcentration of the alkaloids has screwed things up because natural coca is one of the world's best drugs It simply makes whatever you happen to be doing the most deeply satisfying thing in the world Three hours on a hard wooden seat Twenty-four hours without food No problemo señor
Curled up in the bow of our boat with his rifle scanning the banks for tasty monkeys was Aurelio Rivero Aurelio who grew up on a remote homestead in the area made his living as a cacao trader plying the river system in his dugout buying sacks of cacao from the indigenous families that lived along the river piling them precariously in his canoe and selling them down in Trinidad where Volker met him in 2008
By then Volker was already buying wild cacao from several traders and trying to generate interest outside of Bolivia But in recent years word of the chocolatales' existence had leaked out and they'd become something of a cause célèbre with conservation organizations both international and local "This cacao was lying in front of their eyes all of the time" Volker told me No one had ever thought it was worth much "And then I put my own money behind it and did it And then people started saying 'He's taking our resources Getting filthy rich' "
In reality his goal is the same as the conservationists': to preserve the chocolatales which he thinks should be UNESCO World Heritage sites and move ever closer to "long-term sustainability in every economic social and environmental aspect" But he believes in the market-driven approach: "These forests have no value except for cacao If they have no value they'll be cut down [ie,
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