Life, Liberty, and Fine Chocolate

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

He ignored the textbooks on coffee cultivation, relying instead on trial and error. His methods ranged from the strange—talking to his pack cows rather than using whips—to the improvisational—using lianas from the forest rather than nails to join fence poles. He sent his robusta beans to Kinshasa using a modified barge.

By 1989 he was making good money and employed more than 1,000 workers. He had a wife, Bettina, and a daughter, Ricciarda. But the country was growing unstable, and by late 1996, when rebel forces began marching toward Kinshasa, signaling the end of the Mobutu era, Corallo knew that his time in Lomela was coming to an end. He wanted to stay in central Africa. And he wanted to farm.

After much searching, he found and purchased a long-abandoned plantation, a remnant from Príncipe’s cocoa-producing heyday in the 1800s. Located on the island’s humid coast, it had a colonial house that had gone to ruin, and many of its 20,000 cocoa trees had been hidden by a resurgent jungle.

On the beach Corallo built a wooden bungalow for his young family, which now included two boys, Niccolò and Amedeo, and they began to clear the plantation. He was confident that he could farm cocoa successfully. But could he also turn it into fine chocolate?

Although the plantation had old cocoa trees of a quality superior to that of the more recently introduced hybrids found on mainland Africa, they were still forasteros—the most common of the three varieties of cocoa, and the blandest in taste. The finest dark chocolate is often made from trinitario or rare criollo beans.

Corallo was undaunted. He believed he could make up for the beans’ inherent limitations by applying the same commitment that winemakers and olive growers show their crops—the sort of attention rarely seen in the world of chocolate.

“Good chocolate is not necessarily a problem of variety,” he says. “It is a problem of work.”

One morning at 6 a.m., Corallo picked me up at my guesthouse in São Tomé, the islands’ capital city. He wore his usual uniform: old polo shirt, a cheap Casio digital watch, well-worn moccasins, and faded Bermuda shorts. Hanging from a green string on his belt was a tiny Swiss army knife.

He was driving his dark green Panda, which he bought in Italy and shipped to São Tomé. Most expatriates here drive expensive 4x4s.

 “Even if I was offered a Mercedes I would keep the Panda,” he says. “Big cars, mobile phones, watches, clothes. They are for people who want to fill their emptiness with nothing.”

We headed away from the Atlantic Ocean, toward the smoky mountains that loom over the town. After half an hour we had traveled 11 miles and ascended nearly 3,300 feet to reach Corallo’s Nova Moca farm on São Tomé, which doubles as a coffee plantation and an extension of his chocolate factory. On terraced fields either side of an old abandoned farmhouse grew seven different varieties of arabica, robusta, and liberica coffee.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print