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The Cradle of Criollo

8/21/2023

by Rowan Jacobsen
Photo and video by Alyssa D'Adamo

Here we are in Soconusco at last, that fertile coastal plain at the tail end of Mexico, not far from the Guatemala border, where the art of chocolate may well have begun. We’re walking a sizzling-hot field of cashew trees that looks like every other farmer’s field in Soconusco, but the pottery sherds littering the soil tell us otherwise. We’re with Ayax Moreno, Mexico’s best known archaeological illustrator, who was here in 1995 when these fields were exhumed to reveal Paso de la Amada, one of the oldest major sites in Mesoamerica.

The people here were the Mokaya, contemporaries of the Olmec, and on this spot 3,500–3,900 years ago (thousands of years before the Maya or Aztec), you could already find the hallmarks of Mesoamerican culture. There were ballcourts, and palatial gathering spaces, and elegant crafts. And there was chocolate. Ayax picks pieces of pottery out of the soil and shows us the red coloring, the fine lines. Some of that pottery contained traces of cacao residue—the oldest ever identified, except for one site in Ecuador. The peoples of Soconusco were farming and drinking cacao four millennia ago, and they never stopped.

We know this because the Aztecs considered Soconusco to possess the finest cacao in the world. They conquered it in the 1400s for that very reason. The deal was that the province of Soconusco had to send 200 cargas (about 5 million beans) to the Aztec capital every year, or there’d be trouble. When the Spanish took over, they kept the same deal: 5 million beans, every year.

For centuries, Soconusco remained Cacao Central. A survey of one Soconusco town in 1582 found that 83% of the households had cacao orchards, with an average of 343 trees per household. Soconusco still has a reputation for growing some of the best cacao in the world, but the market has shifted. Today, it’s in hot demand in neighboring Oaxaca, drinking-chocolate capital of the universe. (Mexico City’s handful of bean-to-bar makers also snap it up.) Only a tiny trickle makes it onto the international market. Ironically, due to local demand, what was once the most famous cacao in the world has become a well-kept secret.

What made that cacao so desirable, of course, was that it was Criollo: white-beaned, less bitter, deliciously nutty. Criollo probably developed here from earlier strains in Colombia and Venezuela as the people of Mesoamerica kept planting the palest, least-bitter seeds from their favorite trees in their ongoing quest for the ultimate cup of chocolate.

But we haven’t come here for a history lesson. We’re here to find those beans, because the unique circumstances of Soconusco and the rest of Chiapas have made it—according to Alejandro Zamorano, our team lead in Mexico—a “living museum of cacao.”

Just compare it with Tabasco, Mexico’s other big producer. In a normal year, Tabasco is responsible for about two-thirds of Mexico’s cacao, Chiapas the other third. Tabasco is one of Mexico's wealthiest states, a flat coastal plain with modern infrastructure. It’s homogenous, both physically and socially. Chiapas is the opposite, a jumble of mountains, microclimates, and cultures, most of them poor. And so, while the Mexican government successfully managed to get Tabasco’s farmers to replace their relic varieties with modern disease-resistant ones, it didn’t work in Chiapas.

Part of it was cultural—the old farmers just liked their old varieties. “It would be a sin to cut down trees my great-grandfather planted,” one of them told us. Part of it was Oaxaca, which was hooked on Soconusco’s white beans and willing to pay well for them. But part of it was just smart farming. The new government strains were bred for success on nice, flat research stations whose conditions bore little resemblance to the hardscrabble realities of Soconusco hill farms, and the farmers knew it. As one experienced farmer in the valley of Chamulapita told us, “What works at their research station doesn’t work at my farm, 200 meters higher and on the other side of the mountain.” And the reason his trees DO work is because he and his family have been planting them from seed, generation after generation, as the cacao genetics constantly morphed to match the place.

That has yielded some startlingly distinctive and successful farms. A good example is Finca Cuatro Hermanos, a particularly prized estate in Mexico. The four brothers grow about 20 hectares of organic “Acriollado” cacao across several steeply sloped sites in Soconusco, most in the 300–500 meter “sweet spot” that is too high and dry for monilia to thrive, but still warm enough for cacao. On those sites, they manage to produce yields of more than 1,000 kilos per hectare—yields that blow away most conventional cacao. “You just have to pay attention,” says Eifido Siibalkoj, one of the sons of the original hermanos. “Be in the groves every day. Look for monilia. Manage the canopy.” As he talked, grandsons of the four hermanos were cracking pods on the slopes, filling sacks with wet beans, and carrying them down the precipitous paths with tump lines on their foreheads.

One thing you immediately notice in Soconusco’s commercial farms is the prehistoric look of its cacao. If there was any doubt as to the uniqueness of the genetics, the morphology of the pods puts that to rest. The range is phenomenal, but what stands out is the number sporting the classic Criollo dinosaur-egg look: elongated pods, “lagardo” tails, patinated skin, and raised ridges, as if the five plates had been welded together. It just feels old.

But wait, that’s not the only exhibit in the museum. We encountered two other gems to stir the passions of any heirloom-cacao junkie. The first was INIFAP, Mexico’s National Institute for Forestry, Agriculture, and Livestock Research. Carlos Hugo Avendaño Arrazate directs its vaunted experimental cacao plot, which he calls a “showroom for farmers.” Every possible permutation of planting density, shading strategy, trellising technique, and varietal is on display, so a prospective farmer can simply walk around and see what might work on his farm. Then he can take a few cuttings of his favorite discovery and propagate them at home.

As Carlos raced through the groves, grabbing pods and shouting names back in our direction, we counted hundreds of strains—some old, many modern, most a mix. He has no illusions that old-guard Criollo can be the best choice for modern farming, but he is committed to keeping those delicious genes on the ark. And he thinks Mexico has no need for the CCN-51s of the world.

But the real gem of Soconusco awaited us in the town of Cacahoatán, behind the crumbling brick walls of a weathered estate that was known as Finca la Rioja back in the early 20th century, when Moises Muguerza, a Spanish immigrant from Rioja, arrived and went into the cacao business.

Fascinated by the genetic diversity of the plant, Moises collected widely through Chiapas, Tabasco, and Central America, planting his favorites at Finca la Rioja. Then he stopped. Somewhere around World War II, the orchard froze in time.

In the late 20th century, Moises divided the estate among his sons. Most of them had no interest in cacao and cut down the old trees, replacing them with coffee or sugarcane or whatever could give them the most bang for the buck. (One of Moises’ descendants, José Maria Pascacio, has revived the name Finca la Rioja for the part of the old estate that he inherited and replanted, and that cacao won a gold at the 2021 Cocoa of Excellence Awards, becoming the first Mexican cacao to do so since Clara Echeverria’s famed Finca la Joya ten years earlier.)

But one son, Anselmo, was as romantic about cacao as his father. He couldn’t bring himself to cut down the trees he’d grown up with. So he left them untouched, abandoned, a living time capsule. Even the fabrication room is frozen in time, filled with Lehmann mills and melangers from before World War II. (In the 1970s, the president of Lehmann actually showed up on the farm, offering to buy the machines back from Anselmo, for Lehmann’s own showroom. But Anselmo declined, and here they sit still.)

Now Anselmo’s grandson, Pablo Muguerza, is dedicating himself to reviving the orchard. Of the remaining 20 hectares, Pablo has restored about 10. He has no idea what varieties these centurions might belong to—there are no records—and he can’t afford to sequence their DNA, but it’s obvious by their crazy colors and shapes that they belong to a lost world that may exist nowhere but inside this walled garden. A delicious world, too—Pablo has his own boutique equipment, and his chocolate was some of the best we tasted in Mexico. But Pablo struggles to find the resources needed to continue the restoration of the ancient estate and to propagate the old trees. If there was ever a project just waiting for HCP to come along, this felt like the one.

We left Soconusco feeling like the whole place was a showroom for heirloom cacao culture. Not nearly as much cacao grows here as in the glory days—coffee, mangos, cattle ranches, and cities have all cut into the acreage—but its hills are still filled with smart farmers growing great varieties you won’t find elsewhere. This is how it should be. An educated market just up the road with a taste for those beans and a willingness to pay for them. And an emphasis on sustainability, continuity, and tradition. It was a great reminder that in the fight to preserve cacao culture, there’s still a lot worth preserving.

And that’s a wrap for Phase 1 of our trip. Thank you, Mexico! You were never dull, and always tasty. Next up: Guatemala—heartland of the Maya, and one of the rising stars of heirloom cacao.

In Search of the White Jaguar

7/20/2023

by Rowan Jacobsen
Video/Images: Alyssa D'Adamo of the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund

The Lacandon rainforest is a nearly impenetrable mass of mountains and jungle on the border between Mexico and Guatemala. It’s resisted most efforts to tame it so far. The first settlers didn’t arrive until the 1970s, and they didn’t get far. It’s still full of wildlife, a couple of uncontacted indigenous groups, and other people who would prefer that you didn’t contact them, thank you very much.

In other words, it’s WILD. And that’s why we headed for it, following hours of rutty roads through a dreamscape of jagged hills, small settlements, and a raging river the color of an ice pack. It was here, on the edge of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, that the Mexican cacao experts Carlos Avendaño Arrazate and Alexander Mendoza López, from Mexico’s national institute for agriculture and forestry, came across some extremely unusual cacao trees during a collecting expedition in 2010. The trees were tall and spindly, the pods strange and small, both red ones and yellow ones. The beans were extremely white. They found 23 trees in all.

They knew the trees were a relic Criollo variety, dating back to ancient Mayan times, untainted by modern cacao introductions, so they named it “Sac Balam,” or “white jaguar,” after a famous settlement in the forest founded in 1586 by Lacandon Maya who refused to submit to the Spanish invaders. The Maya retreated to the jungle, built a community of about 100 houses, and lived off the land until 1695, when the Spanish finally forced them to integrate. Archaeologists have searched for the remains of Sac Balam for years, to no avail.

And the collecting expedition didn’t have much better luck with this ancient cacao. They germinated a number of seeds back at their research station in Soconusco, but they all died.

But Alexander also planted ten seeds at his house in Soconusco, and a single one of those seedlings survived. For ten years, he coaxed the tree along, until it finally produced a single pod. Then it, too, died. But he planted the seeds from that pod at a friend’s cacao farm, and three of those trees are alive today. So Sac Balam has a fingerhold on survival outside the Lacandon jungle.

Still, for years, Alexander has wanted to revisit the jungle to get new samples, and this HCP expedition finally gave him an opportunity. Permissions to cross the area were obtained from the local community. That’s important in this rough part of Chiapas, one of many in the state under the control of the Zapatistas, the Marxist group that took over a big chunk of Chiapas in 1994, calling for land reforms and greater rights for indigenous groups. Although the Army drove them out of the main cities, they still control much of the Chiapan countryside, and they have morphed into a legit political party with tremendous popular support.

We were in core Zapatista territory, and they were excellent hosts. It seemed like smooth sailing. Still, you could feel the tensions simmering across Chiapas. Just hours after we’d left San Cristobal that morning, a local business leader had been gunned down, and in response there had been shooting and fires across San Cristobal and other towns as rival drug gangs settled scores. The whole state was a tinderbox. A lot of the narcotafficking takes advantage of the remote jungles where we were. So even though the community felt idyllic—clear streams, children playing, hillsides covered in cacao and maize—as strangers, we were at the mercy of our hosts.

And as we bumped along a rutted road in the back of a truck, heading deeper into the valley where Sac Balam had been found 13 years earlier, those hosts got increasingly nervous. Eventually, they hunkered down with us for a conference. “From here forward, do not take photos of any people you see. Do not take photos of anything except cacao trees.”

Okay, no problem.

But a little further down the road, our truck came to a halt by a small house for an emergency strategy session with some locals who knew what lay ahead. It seemed that the deeper part of the jungle where the cacao lay had recently been taken over by narcotraffickers who were farming poppies for heroin production. Everyone had hoped that they would be in a different part of the territory today, but unfortunately they were right where we needed to go. And if they saw strangers with cameras, it wouldn’t be good.

Under the circumstances, it seemed too dangerous to continue. Reluctantly, we turned back. Alexander was crushed. His quest to bring the Lacandon’s wild cacao genes back into the fold of Mexican cacao production was yet another victim of the global instabilities racking Latin America.

But there was a silver lining. When a trail guide at our lodge overheard us talking about wild cacao, he perked up. “There’s a tree here, up the trail,” he said. “Do you want to see it?”

Well, yes, we did. He led us up the trail into a Jurassic Park of thundering waterfalls and dripping limestone caves. Bats flitted in and out. At the base of a giant cliff, he stopped and pointed to a tree. “Cacao,” he said.

Alexander excitedly confirmed its identity. It was about 25 feet tall, skinny, no branches until way up. It had a couple of tiny, aborted pods still clinging to its trunk. Then Alexander spotted a second tree ten yards away. He also spotted a rosita de cacao tree close by. He says the trees often grow together. The flowers have been used to flavor cacao drinks and produce a better froth since ancient times, and the branching sticks make natural molinillos—the wooden whisks used for raising a nice head of froth on your drinking chocolate.

Alexander has a strong belief that everything happens for a reason, and he felt like it was in the plan for us to find these two trees all along.

As we wound our way out of the valley, headed for Soconusco—the land where Criollo was born, and where Alexander has been working for years with some of Mexico’s best cacao farmers in less volatile settings—it felt like the world of heirloom cacao was a tiny sailboat riding a storm of global forces. Perhaps the founders of Sac Balam had the right idea all along.

EPISODE 4: COMALCAN & CARMELO

6/29/2023

by Rowan Jacobsen
Images & Video: Alyssa D'Adamo of the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund

Greetings from La Chontalpa, the cocoa-coated lowlands near Tabasco’s Caribbean coast, where it’s 99 in the shade, 105 in the sun, and getting into a car is like stepping into a microwave. Actually, two of our vehicles have already expired under the thermal assault. All worth it, because this is the biggest cache of cacao in Mexico.
The state of Tabasco is kind of like the Louisiana of Mexico: A hot, steamy swamp on the Gulf of Mexico steeped in strong local traditions, and catapulted out of poverty in the late 20th century by a sudden infusion of wealth from the oil industry. In Louisiana, it’s the seafood industry that exists awkwardly side-by-side with the oil industry. In Tabasco, it’s cacao.
Cacao goes all the way back in Tabasco. When the Spanish annexed Tenochtitlán in 1521 and pulled the rope on the supply chains to see where the Aztecs were tapping the gushers of cacao beans flowing into the city, it led to two places: Soconusco and “La Chontalpa."

Soconusco was more famous at the time, but today Tabasco dominates. A few years ago, The Chocolate Life’s Clay Gordon estimated that Tabasco produced 18,000 tons of cacao per year, Chiapas 4,500 tons. Today, HCP’s cacao-wrangler in Mexico, Alejandro Escriche, guesses that Tabasco supplies two-thirds of Mexico’s production, Chiapas the other third. (With Oaxaca kicking in a rounding-error’s worth of strange strains, all consumed locally.)
For centuries, the cacao in Tabasco was a mix of varieties descended from ancient times. Grafting was unknown. Everyone planted seeds from their favorite trees, every tree was different, the trees cross-pollinated, and a distinctive range of landraces took hold in the Chontalpa. Although Chontalpa cacao had a terrible year in 2023, thanks to a double-whammy of monilia infection and wacky weather, Alejandro will be collecting several different samples of classic Chontalpa field blends for heirloom consideration.

Alma's mother

But the best way to sample that old Chontalpa magic is to taste the chocolate made by Alma Rosa Peralta Moran. For many years, Alma’s father, Rutilo Peralta, led Mexico’s national cacao association. A deep lover of cacao trees, he kept an orchard of all his favorite varieties, planted under the shade of a massive century-old tree. When Don Rutilo died in 2019, he had his ashes buried in a simple grave in the grove, at the base of that tree.

To honor her dad, Alma began making chocolate from the grove’s cacao. She tends the trees, harvests the pods, ferments the beans, and makes the chocolate. Today, Chocolates Don Rutilo is considered to have the finest aromatics in La Chontalpa. (And that’s saying something. When La Chontalpa throws its annual festival, 45 local chocolate makers show up with their creations.) Alma even runs a chocolate pozole delivery service, waking up at 3 in the morning to make and hand-deliver her pozole to her clients in time for breakfast.

But that’s not our main story today. That involves another cacaotero, as they’re called here, named Carlos Echeverria. As you’d expect from a cacao region that predates the Conquest, La Chontalpa was traditionally a mix of Criollo strains, many of which produced white beans with low bitterness and buttery flavors. Such beans are known as almendra blanca, and they have been prized for centuries.

In the 1940s, Carlos Echeverria inherited an abandoned farm scattered with overgrown cacao trees. Many were forms of almendra blanca. Carlos began experimenting, selecting his favorites for propagation, searching for the perfect combination of flavor and vigor, and also doing something unheard of in Tabasco: grafting the trees onto better rootstock to improve their yield. Eventually, he landed on a tree that knocked it out of the park on both flavor and productivity and began cloning it, the first true white-beaned varietal. He named it Carmelo.

Abandoned La Jolla Ranch

Rossanna Hernandez Echeverria

And it was awesome. Intensely aromatic (when properly fermented), gentle on the palate, a good producer. For years, it stayed a local phenomenon, and eventually Carlos died and the farm, Finca La Joya, passed to his daughter, Clara Echeverria. And she would turn out to be a force of nature.

In the 1990s, the fine-chocolate craze surged to life in Europe. Companies like Bonnat and Valrhona began marketing single-origin bars from regions like Chuao, and Clara Echeverria was ready. She was a classy cacaotera with a stately ranch, an excellent handler of trees and fermentation protocols, and Finca La Joya became Mexico’s first famed single-origin. There were prizes at the international cocoa awards. Scientists and chocolate-industry bigwigs came to stay at Finca La Joya, which accrued the cache of a top wine estate.

And prices exploded. $10 a pound for Carmelo beans. Then $20. A kind of tulip mania took hold. Everyone in the region wanted to plant Carmelo trees and get in on the game. Clara spread the wealth, selling trees as well as beans, and La Chontalpa hitched its wagon to Carmelo.

And then it all came crashing down. The other farmers in Tabasco weren’t used to working with grafted varieties, which need more TLC than trees planted from seed (pie franco in the local parlance, a term borrowed from the wine industry that means “free feet”). Worse, their Carmelo didn’t taste like Finca La Joya’s. This would not have surprised anyone in the wine business. It wasn’t just the genetics of the trees. It was the terroir of the place. It was the soil, the landscape, Clara’s management and fermentation skills.

It was also supply and demand. Soon, there was a glut of Carmelo on the market, most of it not very good. The bubble burst. Prices tanked. And when monilia hit Tabasco like a hurricane in 2005, the Carmelo craze came crashing down.

The good times didn’t even last at Finca La Joya. Clara died in 2013, the family squabbled over the ranch, and a few years ago Rancho La Joya was abandoned. We stood outside its locked gate and flew a drone over the overgrown ruins, a source of profound heartache to Clara’s daughter, Rossanna Hernandez Echeverria, who lives a kilometer away and has started her own young orchard of almendra blanca to continue her mother’s legacy.

But the legacy of La Chontalpa’s almendra blanca isn’t just in her hands. She has help a few kilometers away, where her young cousin, Clara’s great niece, Alma Delia Magaña Peralta, is stewarding a few hectares of Finca La Joya’s trees at Finca Las Delias, a lush organic and biodynamic orchard in her family’s back forty. About 83% of the trees are almendra blanca, interspersed with a handful of other varieties for diversity and an abundance of shade trees and other fruit crops—a classic biodynamic fruit forest.

“We’re sort of hippies,” explains Alma. “Maybe the only hippies in Tabasco.” Alma, who is in her 20s, had actually left the Chontalpa for the big city, where she was working as an architect, but the pandemic brought her home, where her mother had planted the trees in honor of her Aunt Clarita. Soon, Alma was drawn to the rhythms of biodynamic farming, and she took it to the next level.

Finca Las Delias

It’s still a work in progress, but things are looking promising. Yields have bounced from 1.2 tons in 2019 to just half that in 2020 and 2021, before bouncing back to well over a ton in 2022 and another good year in 2023, as Alma got her farm management dialed in.

Fermentation, too. “When I started,” Alma says, “I couldn't make any connection between what was a good smell in the beans and what was a bad one. For me, everything was bad, because it smelled like vinegar!” But after tasting enough of the chocolate, she began using a lighter hand with fermentation, which suits such gentle beans, and today her beans have brought Carmelo’s reputation right back to its 1990s peak. They command some of the highest prices in the world, and they are snapped up by Mexico’s handful of bean-to-bar chocolate makers.

Almendra Blanca Finca Las Delias

So while Finca Las Delias needs no help from HCP to find the market or prove its quality, Alma was still thrilled to get a visit from HCP because of the promise of greater community. It’s a bit lonely being the only hippie organic cacaotera in Tabasco, and she would love to have more pros in her network to swap tips on tree management, to share trials and tribulations, to be reminded of the value of growing great cacao. It’s a good reminder that underlying HCP’s mission of Discover, Identify, and Preserve is an important foundation of community-building that is essential to the people working for a future of amazing chocolate.

That’s the unexpected takeaway from Tabasco as we hop another series of buses and trucks for the Lacandon Jungle, the most pristine and remote rainforest in North America, where we hope to get insights into the earliest communities to cultivate cacao in North America—and maybe even get a few glimpses of the feral descendants of those efforts. Wish us luck, and please send more mosquito repellant if you can.

Alma and her parents

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HCP in Action

The Cradle of Criollo

In Search of the White Jaguar

EPISODE 4: COMALCAN & CARMELO

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