EPISODE 4: COMALCAN & CARMELO

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.
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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.
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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