Life, Liberty, and Fine Chocolate

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After a decade on the island, Corallo is well known and respected. One afternoon I was interviewing Rafael Branco, a former foreign minister, when Corallo’s name came up. “You see the car he drives, the simple way he lives, the things he does for this country? Don’t give us aid—give us 10 clones of Corallo,” says Branco.

In the gourmet chocolate industry, Corallo remains the quirky outsider and has yet to gain the recognition he feels his chocolate merits.

Chloé Doutre-Roussel, a fine-chocolate expert who introduced Corallo’s bars to Britain when she was at Fortnum & Mason, says that while Corallo’s chocolate is good, it is not the finest. However, she admires his tenacity and honesty. Some chocolate makers concoct less-than-truthful stories about the origins of their beans and the degree of care taken in production. Corallo, on the other hand, refuses to use positive labels he might easily adopt, such as “organic” and “slow food.”

“He is the complete opposite of the sharks who use marketing to fool customers into buying their chocolate,” says Doutre-Roussel. “He is in his own world, conducting this experiment with a wonderful obsession.”

But an obsession can be draining. One evening, Corallo told me that for the first time in years he was feeling exhausted. Last year he and Bettina were divorced. She still handles the distribution side of the business from Lisbon, where she now lives with Ricciarda, but her absence is keenly felt.

After Bettina left, Corallo asked his son Niccolò, now a tall, mild-mannered 19-year-old, to postpone his final year of schooling to help him manage the business. It is not something he is proud of.

“I am now the number one for child labor—my own son,” he says. “But without Niccolò I could not do this.”

Later that night, when he took Niccolò and Amedeo, 15, out to dinner at a seafront restaurant, Corallo perked up, excitedly picking out the Big Dipper in the sequined sky.

He talked about the future. He aims to buy more of his ingredients locally, which should help the other farmers on Príncipe. Already he has got some of them growing ginger, and he hopes to get cane sugar from them, too.

If that happens, he might try to make rum. Exporting smoked fish is another option. In a few years, if things improve in Congo, he might even be able to spend part of his time on his old coffee farm in Lomela, close to the jungle of his childhood dreams.

As he says, “My heart belongs in the middle of the forest.”

Excerpted from New Statesman(Jan. 15, 2009), Britain’s award-winning current affairs magazine and a 2009 Utne Independent Press Award nominee for general excellence; www.newstatesman.com.

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