Focus on Fine flavor
What is Cocoa Cépage?
Cépage: the blend of grapes that comprise a bottle of wine.
Cocoa Cépage: an exploration of the highest quality cocoa beans the world has to offer, and the chocolate flavors that can be coaxed from them.
Chocolate contains roughly three times more flavor compounds than red wine. So why aren’t we discussing our chocolate in similar tasting detail?
The primary reason is that most widely distributed chocolates in the US (and indeed the world) are mass produced from cacao grown for quantity, not quality. A growing contingent of small-scale artisanal chocolate makers in the US are challenging this model, carefully selecting beans with genetic and regional heritage (known as “fine flavor cocoa”) and coaxing flavors that are rarely uniform from one batch of chocolate to another.
If you’re interested enough to ask what grape varieties are in your bottle of wine (its cépage), what the vintage or growing season was like, or how it was made in the winery, then you’re ready to talk about chocolate in precisely the same way.
Cacao tree genetics, the terroir of a growing location, the fermentation methods employed for the raw cacao seeds, the cocoa bean roasting process, the refining and conching of those beans into chocolate liquor—these are the factors that contribute to the flavor of well-crafted chocolate.
Our Process
Select: We work with the best bean brokers in the US to source sustainably produced beans with identifiable characteristics that point to thousands of years of evolution, rather than modern hybridization for large commodity crops.
Roast: We carefully roast small batches of beans from individual farmers or local cooperatives to bring forward their natural flavor complexity.
Melange: We grind and conch the roasted beans into a chocolate that highlights these flavors in the most interesting way. We allow the flavor profile of the chocolate to dictate the quantity of sugar added, and whether milk or other additions may heighten its unique qualities.
Create: In addition to single-origin bars, we use our chocolate to create bonbons in which multiple chocolates and specialty ingredients are married to create a complex work of art. But regardless of additions, the chocolate is always the star.