A letter from Claudio Corallo
Dear chocolate and coffee lovers,
I thought you might be interested to know a little about my experiences, which are what make my chocolate and coffee what they are today. I’ve worked for more than 32 years to get here, so it isn’t easy to put all of that into just a few words. Perhaps the best way to describe my work, with both the cocoa and the coffee, is an approach not unlike the care that a producer of fine wine gives to his vines and his oak barrels. Through all my experiences with coffee and cocoa I always strive to be completely integrated, seeking only to enhance, and not harm the local environment of the people with whom I work.
My name is Cláudio Corallo. I graduated from the Instituto Agronómico per l’Oltremare in Florence, Italy. In 1974 I went to Zaïre (the former Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of Congo) on a sócio-agricultural aid project. I left after one year, but I stayed on in Zaire. For the next two years I bought, transformed and exported coffee, but I found that the trading world was not for me. Nevertheless, I became fascinated by the enormous differences in taste and smell of the coffee, even when they came from the same variety. I then decided to devote myself to producing coffee.
In 1979 I managed to buy two old plantations that were practically abandoned in the center of Zaire. These early years confirmed what I’d always believed, which is that teamwork was the way to the very best results. I built a team, and as we worked on an old variety of robusta coffee (canephora) our enthusiasm grew and grew. The coffee became so sweet that many experts couldn’t believe it was from that species.
We were completely isolated on the plantations in the rainforest, at the geographic center of the gigantic country that is the Congo. We were often visited by elephants, leopards and wild buffaloes. At first we built a small landing strip, but because of the many air crashes in the country and soaring fuel costs, I soon began to travel by river. Every round trip between the plantation and Kinshasa was 3,200 kms. (2,000 miles) in a motorized pirogue. Part of the trip was down the rivers that Joseph Conrad described in his Heart of Darkness, but there was also a long stretch from the main rivers of ever smaller serpentine streams, completely covered by the equatorial rainforest canopy.
In 1983 from a trip to the small African island country of São Tome e Príncipe, my wife brought back some amazing samples of cocoa and coffee. We fell in love with them to such an extent that we decided that we must go to the archipelago at the first opportunity. When civil wars took hold of Zaire, in 1993 I decided to move my family (wife Bettina and children Ricciarda and Niccolo who were born while we were in Zaire) to São Tome e Príncipe (where our third child, Amedeo, was later born), going back and forth until 1997 when I joined them for good. During all this time I was searching for the same plants that my wife had first brought to Zaire.
I finally found them on the island of Príncipe, where history tells us that in 1819 the Portuguese first introduced cocoa plants to Africa, bringing them from the Bahia region of Brazil. These original plants, from an old abandoned plantation which had been swallowed up by the rain forest, survived thanks to the monkeys whose innate taste for the best cocoa led them to spread these seeds throughout the rainforest, where the plants reproduced spontaneously. I then took on this abandoned plantation, Terreiro Velho.
Just as I had done in Zaire I began the arduous work of recovering and selected the best plants, now helped by more than 20 years of experience on the ground. At first we lived in a small log cabin on the beach, next to a tiny fresh water stream. It was extremely humid, but we were happy surrounded by the cocoa plants that we had searched so long to find, though when it rained the tropical downpours on the zinc roof rendered all conversation impossible. Over the years with great care we perfected controlled fermentation and drying methods that exalted the qualities of this extraordinary cocoa.
All this time I had been searching for original coffee plants too and finally found them in a rock pile where previous passes by a tractor yanking out old plants had somehow missed them. There was a small stand of an ancient variety or arábica coffee that interested me. Thus, in1998 I started working on another abandoned plantation called Nova Moca, on the other island that makes up the country, São Tome. To halt erosion on the sloping land we built terraces with small rock walls. The coffee trees produced almost nothing at first, victims of the whims of the seasons. But this was an arábica with more body that any I had ever found in all my life, a dream. We drank it constantly as we worked on it, mixing it with tests of the cocoa beans we were also working on across the water in Príncipe. My son Niccolo, who was then 14, doesn’t drink coffee, but he would always pop in to eat some beans, accompanied by a few pieces of chocolate, make a few comments, and disappear again.
I fondly remember us at the end of the work day, as the sun set, gathering in the small chocolate “factory” we had set up on our plantation in Príncipe. We would taste the results from the day’s tests of different production methods, choosing our favorites. Sometimes we would melt the chocolate and drink it, almost entering into a frenzy. There we were, tasting and trying long into the night.
My very best wishes,
Cláudio Corallo
