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Article by Rowan Jacobsen Images by Alyssa D’Adamo What do we mean when we say something is “wild”? To most of us, something is wild if it’s untamed, uncivilized, still living in an area with minimal human influence, and thus a good representative of how things used to be before people remade the world to their own tastes. But that’s not what we mean when we talk about wild criollo, one of the most prized cacaos in the world. In fact, we kind of mean the opposite. For centuries, criollo was the most civilized of all cacaos. For thousands of years, in its slow journey from South America to Central America, it was transformed by people who kept planting the palest seeds, because those seeds had fewer of the polyphenol compounds that give cacao its purple color and its bitter and astringent qualities.  Eric Ac capturing images of wild cacao By the time Maya civilization brought chocolate to its cultural heights, criollo was one of the most refined crops in the world. And it had the narrow genetic profile to prove it. It was more Siamese cat than jaguar. And we all know what happened next. The Spanish arrived, criollo cacao cultivation expanded, first in Mesoamerica and then around the planet, and soon diseases were decimating it both abroad and in its homeland. Then came industrial agriculture and the introduction of new varieties and selected hybrids designed to resist disease and improve yields (at the expense of flavor). The result was that what we call criollo today is not the same as the criollo revered in Mesoamerica before the 1700s. Modern criollos are a mix between ancient criollo and other introduced cacaos. Cacao trees cross-pollinate, so even the seeds of a “pure” criollo will contain a mixture of genes from the mother tree and from other cacao trees in the vicinity that provide the pollen.
These remnant populations are the genetic motherlodes, the direct links to chocolate’s heyday, the only true taste of what it was like way back when. That makes them incredibly important for chocolate’s future, as both breeding stock and inspiration. If you can find them. That, of course, was one of HCP’s primary goals on its Guatemala journey, a goal that gains urgency as the last forests in Central America get cleared, both legally and illegally, and the cacao goes with them. Sometimes it can feel like a hopeless battle, but we can now say that our hopes are much higher than they were a few weeks ago. This is one of those rare cases where results easily exceeded our expectations.  Eric Ac and Eduardo Juarez Perez with their findings It all started with Erick Ac’s groundwork. Erick sent out his feelers across the country, pinpointing two communities where wild criollo could make a stand, and where HCP support could make the difference. The first is Santa María Tzejá, a Mayan village in the tropical rainforest near the Mexican border that was only settled in 1970 (by Mayans fleeing persecution by the Guatemalan ruling class). Before that, the area probably hadn’t been occupied since the times of the ancient Maya—which makes it just the kind of place where you’d hope ancient criollo might still be found. And it was! Last year, Erick’s brother Luis taught a training workshop for fine-cacao farming to cacao growers in the Santa María Tzejá region. Luis preached the gospel of criollo, and after the workshop, a farmer named Eduardo Juarez contacted Erick and said he thought he might have some wild criollo trees near him. The search for wild criollo is a bit like the search for Bigfoot. Most of the sightings don’t pan out. Many farmers in Guatemala refer to any cacao planted from seed as “criollo,” so Erick has learned to take all leads with a grain of salt. But Eduardo said that no one he knew had planted the trees, and that the pods were very small. That was enough to get Erick’s attention, so when the HCP gave him the opportunity to check out these kinds of leads, Eduardo’s name was near the top of his list.
The day got even better. At other spots in the forest, they found a second wild phenotype, with larger pods, and then a third, with red pods and white seeds. The trees were growing in deep shade, which was impressive, but Erick thinks a little less shade and a dash of fertilizer could make a huge improvement in pod production. It was hard to tell who was more excited, Erick or Eduardo. Santa María Tzejá was a goldmine of ancient criollo genetics, and Eduardo said that other farmers in neighboring villages had told him they knew of similar trees in their woods. Erick plans on checking those out on his next visit. For now, they germinated some seeds from the pods, with the goal of starting a clonal garden, and they grafted 30 trees with the budwood they collected. If all goes well, in two years they should have enough production to make some test batches of chocolate. In the meantime, the main goal is to make sure none of the wild trees get cut down. Last year, the electric company tried to clear a swath of forest where some of the cacao trees were growing, but Eduardo stopped them. “We need more farmers like this!” Erick says.
Jacob had learned of this cacao a few years ago, when he came to check out Uaxactún because of its participation in a project meant to find ways for remote communities to live sustainably off a protected area. That meant finding “non-timber forest products” that could generate income, such as honey, allspice, chicle (for chewing gum), and xaté, a leaf used for floral arrangements. But cacao could quickly become the heart of the program. That all started about 60 years ago, when the father of Don Chico Pop noticed two wild cacao trees in the forest where he lived, growing near some ancient Maya ruins. He used to pick the pods and use the pulp and seeds at home. Don Chico was 13 at the time, and ever since, he has been stewarding the trees. A few years ago, he began planting seeds from them. He and his family have now planted about 3,500.
Now, a month later, the HCP team was thrilled to find these beans awaiting us. They smelled great. Perhaps enough for an HCP micro-sample? At the very least, it’s enough to make a little chocolate and do a little analysis. So we’ll soon know a lot more about the genetics and flavor of this emissary from chocolate’s golden period. Next steps: Erick will be teaching the Uaxactún community how to graft, how to establish a nursery and clonal garden, and how to cultivate new orchards. For Jacob Marlin, this Uaxactún experience couldn’t have been a better example of why HCP decided to become more proactive in its mission. “These discovery activities are critical!” he says. “No one else is doing this!” Sure, it would be easier to simply assess samples as they are submitted, but then we’re almost sure to miss the most endangered and interesting ones of all. “We have to find these really fine-flavor cacaos before they’re lost,” he says. “If we just wait for the occasional sample to come in, we get a couple here and there, but if we’re actively out there like this, we’re gonna get dozens.”  So expect HCP to stay actively out there, country by country. One essential thing we learned on these first trips is that there’s still time. There’s still a lot of fascinating, forgotten cacao out there to be discovered. But we’re in the mission-critical period, as forests fall and farms turn over. So please keep checking back here for more updates, as we get to know the cacaos from Mexico and Guatemala and begin to move forward on future trips.
And please spread the word. Heirloom cacao will only be preserved if people fall in love with it. Fortunately, that’s usually the easy part. Written by Rowan Jacobsen Images/Video by Alyssa D'Adamo The little country of Guatemala does not make many people’s lists of fine-cacao paradises, but it’s been on HCP’s radar for years. Here in the heartland of the Maya, chocolate appreciation stretches back to oldest antiquity. Long before cacao was a cash crop, people here were growing a few trees in their yard for personal use, and many still do. Sometimes it feels like everywhere we turn, there’s another strange and fascinating heirloom tree.
And he’s taken us everywhere to meet them. From the fertile, volcanic Pacific coast, which was famous for its cacao orchards 500 years ago, to the Alta Verapaz highlands where his own farm is located, to the steamy lowlands of Petén, in search of wild cacao. At all these locations, Erick’s been doing the detailed work needed to establish new sources of superb cacao. So this seems like the perfect time to explain not just how we do this work, but why it’s so necessary. And for that, it’s worth backtracking a little bit. HCP was founded in 2012 for the purpose of recognizing and honoring the world’s greatest sources of fine-flavor heirloom cacao, as a way of ensuring that they wouldn’t suddenly disappear. The criteria were rigorous. Applicants had to wow our tasting panel in a blind test, and they had to be genetically interesting. Since then, HCP has designated 17 heirlooms, from 11 different countries.  But in order to pass the test, these farms already had to be operating at an elite level. They had to have great cacao, they had to nail the flavor in their post-harvest processing, and they had to be large enough to submit 8 kilograms of well-fermented beans. In other words, these were the All-Stars, and they were already playing in the major leagues. But for there to be a major league, of course, there needs to be minor leagues, a feeder system of potential phenoms still in development. This might be small farms with great flavor genetics but little knowledge about how to coax those flavors out of the fermentation process, or it could be small numbers of heirloom trees on established farms that are getting mixed in with less interesting varieties, or it might even be wild trees still clinging to existence in the jungle. HCP realized that to preserve fine cacao, it wasn’t enough to acknowledge the reigning masters. We somehow needed to find the unknown cacaos—especially those with a tenuous grasp on existence—and help them get started on the path to becoming the next generation of prized beans and flourishing farms. And that’s what we’re doing. The process got underway last year, with the release of the Review of Cacao Explorations and Germplasm Movements, produced by Lambert Motilal at Trinidad’s Cocoa Research Center with support from HCP and the Lesley Family Foundation. That 289-page opus provided a roadmap of cacao genetics around the world, showing how cacao had spread from its Amazon birthplace, and pinpointing the places most likely to still harbor great flavor varieties that had escaped the transition to mass-market bulk cacao in the 20th century.
The answer is that you need on-the-ground partners like Erick, who already know the lay of the land. In Erick’s case, this knowledge came through years of consulting with farmers across the country, helping them to pivot toward fine-flavor cacao production. That learning process started with his own farm. It’s named Finca Ana Maria, after his mother. He started the farm with his father and his six brothers back in 2006. The family had always grown corn, but they had become increasingly concerned about corn’s impact on the land. “Corn is very intensive,” says Erick. “It’s necessary to use chemicals. And you have to remove the whole forest. You don’t leave anything on the land.” They preferred cacao, because it could be part of a mixed agroforestry system that conserved soil and water and sequestered carbon. “It’s a really good crop,” Erick says. “A lot of co-benefits."  But after exploring different models, Erick quickly saw that growing bulk cacao was never going to be commercially viable. Like most farms in Guatemala, Finca Ana Maria was too small to compete on price with large cacao plantations. The only thing that made sense was to grow specialty cacao that would command top dollar. Thus began years of experimentation. The surrounding area of Alta Verapaz actually had lots of great criollo strains, mixed in with more modern Trinitario introductions. Why not try them all? “One of my principles is that all cacao varieties in Guatemala have the potential to produce very good flavors,” Erick says. But each is going to require a different regimen of weeding, pruning, shade regulation, nutrition, and fermentation. “There’s no fixed rule,” Erick says. “You always have to experiment.” Erick was particularly keen to play around with the many white-seeded cacaos in the region, despite their reputation for being poor producers, because he knew they were in demand. And he found that their bad reputation was a myth, started by “experts” who had only worked with modern hybrids. “People say that white-bean trees are too low-yielding and too susceptible to disease,” he says, “but we’ve shown that Criollos are equal or better producers than the best Trinitarios.” The gamble paid off, as Finca Ana Maria’s white-bean trees have delivered strong yields and have been snapped up by European chocolatiers at $9–10/kilo. “The economic model is working really well,” Erick says.
So Erick already had a hit list in mind, a mixture of active and semi-abandoned farms. We just had to tag along for the groundtruthing. This is the heart of the HCP discovery work. You find farms with interesting cacao. You take photos of every notable tree. Trees that seem the most promising get geotags and complete morphological descriptions of flowers, leaves, pods, everything. How old are they? How are they being managed? What’s the soil like? The climate? How does the pulp taste? Are they healthy? Do we know anything about where they came from? Then you take some pods and leaves for later analysis. Most of these rare trees don’t exist in numbers sufficient to produce the 8 kilograms of dried beans needed for a full-blown HCP tasting panel assessment. Maybe there are only a handful of the trees. Maybe just one. So the first goal is to get these trees into the development leagues. Step 1: Don’t let them get cut down! That part is obvious, but it can still be challenging. Step 2: Make more of them! Plant seeds in a nursery. Take budwood cuttings from individual trees and use them to establish clonal gardens of identical trees, so a single windstorm or chainsaw can’t push the variety into extinction. The clonal gardens also become a living laboratory, where you can learn what makes this variety happy. Step 3: Spread the love! Once you have enough seedlings in your nursery, make them available to other farmers, along with information on how to manage them. That’s how a new heirloom is born.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.  Photos provided by Erick Ac As a part of the Lesley Family Foundation Grant, the Heirloom Cacao Preservation organized a field course dedicated to cacao agroforestry systems and post-harvest processes at Finca Ana María, Cobán, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala. 
Cacao Agroforestry SystemsThe participants were received at the farm's facilities and began with a tour of the nursery, later the group took a guided tour of the farm's cocoa plantations and ended the tour at the processing center. In the afternoon, the whole group met to participate in a talk on the principles of cocoa nutrition and the experiences of organic and conventional nutrition at Finca Ana María, given by Jorge Mario Monzon and Erick Ac, then we implemented a practice on preparation and application of nutrition to cacao trees.  Maintenance
They spent the afternoon in the cacao nursery to talk about the propagation of plants, selection of genetics and cloning material. Farmers learned various, practical grafting techniques in nursery and adult trees.  Harvest and Post-Harvest ProcessesA key exercise was to identify cacao varieties that do not change color when ripe, this allowed us to show the sound technique to identify the optimal harvest moment. In this process, the groups had the opportunity to discuss and strengthen the criteria for harvesting. All the harvested cocoa was transported to the processing center, where they had the opportunity to carry out all the activities of weighing, recording, filling boxes and taking initial pH and temperature data. At the same time, the producers learned about the registration instruments for batch traceability in the fermentation, pre-drying and final drying processes.
The IndustryProducers addressed the structure of a functional business model—learning to address the content of the production, financial, human resources, and marketing plans. Participants carried out an analysis and characterization of the cocoa and fine chocolate markets, and compared results for feedback. At the end of the event, tools were delivered to the small producer organizations of Uaxactún and FICCI, RL. Each group was given 4 small pruning shears, 4 large branch pruning shears and 4 Victorinox knives for grafting.  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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
 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.
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 written by Rowan Jacobsen Meet Dionisia Garcia Juárez, a Chinantec woman who lives in the town of San Felipe de Léon, tucked deep into a fold of the Chinantla, a vertiginous corner of northeastern Oaxaca. She’s a spry 55, still climbing the steep paths of her farmstead in a traditional huipil, the woven tunic of the peoples of southern Mexico that captures the history and beliefs of her ancestors in embroidered symbols. The Chinantec people have lived here since forever, and they’ve cultivated cacao approximately that long. They self-governed for centuries until the Aztecs rolled into town around 1455, happily allied with the Spaniards in the 1520s to boot their oppressors, and then of course wound up rebelling against the Spanish a decade later.  The valleys and slopes of the Chinantla are so steep that the Chinantec developed a unique language that includes a variety of sharp whistles that can be used to convey complex information from one ridge to another. The language has been studied extensively by anthropologists, and there are still about 100,000 Chinantec speakers, but it’s mostly just the old people these days who know how to make and interpret the whistles. The kids use cell phones. San Felipe de Léon has just enough altitude to exist in that rare band where both coffee and cacao can thrive. Any lower and its too hot for good coffee; any higher is too cool for cacao. The people of San Felipe de Léon grow both in a delicate dance. The coffee is new, but the cacao is a constant. “When I was a kid,” says Dionisia, “these mountains were covered in cacao. We just treated it like any other fruit.” They used it in their drinks, especially atole and pozol, and sold anything extra to coyotes—middlemen who are like traveling pawn shops, rolling into town with a truck and a roll of cash and buying anything farmers are desperate to sell at extremely low prices. Coyotes are always a last resort, but if you’re a farmer without the means to haul your cacao to a distant city where you might get a better price, they can be better than nothing.
But to earn the higher price paid by both domestic and international bean-to-bar customers, good fermentation is essential, and that’s the next step. Alejandro Zamorano, HCP’s lead on this project, is kick-starting the first fermentation fenter in San Felipe De Leon, with support from HCP. Soon quality Chinantla cacao will be finding its way into craft chocolate for the first time.
Alejandro surveyed the trees with barely contained fervor. “Look at the pale color of the new leaves!” he shouted, snapping photos. “You can tell it’s white-beaned.” The genetic mutation that drained the color from Criollo beans did the same to its leaves. These trees were the real deal, a living chunk of Oaxacan history. And there was another important piece of Oaxacan history and culture growing all over those hillsides, mixed in with the cacao and coffee: pataxte, aka Theobroma bicolor, or white cacao. Pataxte is cacao’s less flashy sibling, and it has always played a supporting role in Oaxaca’s traditional beverage culture. Its white beans have less fat than cacao, a milder taste, and they are exceptionally good at producing a froth
Now pataxte is having a moment. Next-gen Oaxacan eateries are featuring it more prominently. Leading the way is Olga Cabrera’s remarkable Tierra del Sol, which uses it in a sublime white mole, as well as in a veriety of mixed-cacao drinks and pastries. A trickle of pataxte is even making its way to the wider world through exporters like Alejandro, who pays Dionisia $16 a kilo for all the pataxte she can get her hands on. (He buys her cacao and coffee, too.) That makes it more expensive than virtually any cacao in the world, but it’s necessary to cover the meager yields and difficulty separating the beans from the pods. Alejandro had never seen a whole hillside of his newest obsession before, and he gaxed around in astonishment. Most of the pataxte in the world is coming from this one valley. Dionisia handed us small white disks of pure pataxte chocolate to try, containing nothing but pataxte and sugar. It was rich, creamy, mild, and nutty, like peanut-butter fudge. It didn’t taste remotely like chocolate, but we could immediately comprehend why people have been mixing the two together for centuries. They are natural partners. Dionisia likes to mix 1/4 pataxte into her drinking chocolate, along with sugar and a touch of cinnamon.
by Rowan Jacobsen
Photos © Alyssa D'Adamo of the HCP 
We’ve been thinking a lot about foam these past couple of days in Oaxaca. That, of course, puts us firmly in line with a practice that goes back millennia in Mesoamerica. Long before the Viennese began ladling whipped cream onto their “Kapuziner” coffees (1700s) or the Italians began using their new espresso machines to steam some milk (1900s), Mesoamerican cultures were paying a lot of attention to the foam that topped their chocolate drinks.
They went to great lengths to produce it. They would pour the chocolate from on high, one vessel to another, back and forth, raising a froth that both the Maya and Aztec singled out as the best part of the drink. They even designed vessels with special spouts designed not for pouring but for channeling breath into the drink to give it a foamy head. (Hat tip to Rich Tango-Lowy for that insight.) This has always seemed charming, but maybe just a little bit…bourgie? One minute, you’re smashing your neighbors’ skulls with obsidian-edged warclubs, and the next you’re working on your barista skills? But of course, there was way more to it than that, and we’ve been getting some insights into that here in Oaxaca—insights that help to shine a light onto heirloom cacao’s outsized importance. Oaxaca is definitely the place to think about this stuff. When it comes to foamy drinks, the place makes Rome look downright…flat. In every marketplace, you find women making the traditional drinks of their regions. Many include chocolate, and most of them come topped with a big cloud. 
You find these drinks in every town of Oaxaca, says Shava Cueva, the creator of Beverages of Oaxaca, a photographic odyssey documenting these drinks and the women who make them. The recipes change from town to town, family to family, as they are passed down through the generations. Some are only made on special occasions—weddings, festivals, funerals. Some are only made once a year and involve wild ingredients that are really hard to find. All are hard to prepare. And that turns out to be important.
The perfect example of this is the chocolate atole made by Carina Santiago, a Zapotec women who lives in Teotitlán del Valle, a town in the countryside outside Oaxaca City that’s famous for its weaving. Carina’s drink requires many ingredients and takes two hours to make. It’s a variation on others in Teotitlán, but it’s her own family’s take on chocolate atole. She learned the recipe from her mother, who learned it from her mother, and so on. She frames this in a particular way: “It’s been passed down for generations from women I love.” To start, Carina toasts cacao, wheat, her neighbor’s yellow maize, and cinnamon on a comal over a fire, one ingredient at a time, stirring with her hand and a straw brush to get just the right amount of toastiness, the smell slowly filling the room. The corners of the corn blacken. A few of them pop off the comal.
Oaxaca is the epicenter of Mexican cacao consumption. The state pounds an extraordinary amount of cacao each day, a river of drinking chocolate and mole negro pouring into the mouths of locals and tourists alike, but almost all of it is low-quality lavado, bulk cacao washed before fermentation. Locals actually prefer the harsh astringency and bitterness to balance the intense sweetness of the drinks, but Carina uses just a touch of honey in her atole and insists on an heirloom Criollo from Chiapas for its buttery richness. It makes her drink costly as well as time-consuming. Special.
By the time the maize comes off the comal, the cacao has cooled enough to peel by hand. We pitch in. Part of the deal is the pitch-in. The peeled cacao is black, shiny, polished like mahogany, completely unlike cacao roasted in an oven. Baskets of each ingredient are placed around a metate, the curved grinding stones used by women throughout Mesoamerica for thousands of years. Carina has some she inherited from her grandmother. She kneels behind the metate on a woven pad and bears down, grinding each ingredient to powder with her stone roller. It’s all slow, meditative, the toasting and sweeping and grinding, a kind of Zen incantation. To the toasted ingredients, she adds others like cinnamon, brown sugar, and pataxte (Theobroma bicolor, the real “white cacao”; more on that soon). The pataxte, which looks like white cacao beans, is buried underground for nine months by her daughter-in-law, and watered periodically so it ferments. That’s key to produce white cacao’s special trick: it’s a foaming agent par excellence. Some ingredients, like cinnamon, grind easy; others, especially the corn, make even Carina break out in a sweat as she bears down on the fat heirloom grains. At a fiesta, says Carina, there will be twenty metates going at once, all the village women leaning in with their ripped forearms. The cacao goes on the metate last, because, unlike the other ingredients, it doesn’t grind down into powder, but rather a rich paste, to which all the other ingredients are added, and everything is ground some more until you are left with a thick mole of sorts. 
This goes into a gourd-shaped pot with hot water, and then the hard work continues. Out comes the molinillo, the stick used to raise the froth. Carina spins it furiously between her palms, back and forth, droplets spattering the sides of the pot, for a good ten minutes, until it looks like cocoa-colored whipped cream.
She pours corn atole into a ceramic bowl and ladles the foam on top until it’s splashing over the sides like a chocolate jacuzzi. She holds it up to us with a smile. It’s delicious, of course, deep with the roasty notes of the corn and cacao, but that’s almost beside the point. The point is the gift. Here, I made this hard thing for you. “You have to put love into it,” she says. “When you taste it, you taste the flavor, but you also taste the love.”
And the foam is the best part, just like the Maya and Aztecs explained to the Spanish. As we dip our faces into the cloud and lick our frothy mustaches, we savor the creamy chocolate, and the symbolism as well. Carina has poured herself into this offering, elevating it with her effort from a simple drink into an airy offering, a bit of spirit caught in suspension for a brief moment in time. Drink it fast. The bubbles are already popping, the spirit returning to earth. Accept the gift.
Since our visit to Carina, I keep thinking about those old Mayan pots with the blowing spouts, how they captured the maker’s breath in a thousand bubbles, an infusion of air, maybe from someone you love. Of course the foam was the best part. And of course chocolate was the conduit. Handmade chocolate is always hard, a shapechanger with a knack for capturing the imprints of its maker and passing them along. Here, I made this for you. Or so it seems, this toasty night in Oaxaca. We’ll learn more as we visit cacao farmers in Tabasco and Chiapas in the coming days and learn a bit more about their lives. Abrazos from the road. |
