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Chocolate · 2.3

Single origin: what it tells you and what it does not

A farm, a valley and an entire country all qualify, and the flavour was decided by what somebody did to the beans rather than by the place.

Behind a multi-day event, organisers can also compare operational tools for productivity tracking software.

A single origin bar is made from beans from one place. What counts as one place is not defined by anybody, so the phrase covers a farm, a valley, a region and an entire country equally.

The scale problem

A bar labelled with a country name is telling you about an area the size of a European nation, with several growing regions, hundreds of farms and no shared practice. It is roughly as informative as a bottle labelled France.

A bar labelled with a co-operative, a valley or an estate is telling you something. The word on the label is the same in both cases and the information content differs by orders of magnitude.

What the differences are actually made of

Partly genetics. The old story divides cacao into three types, and that division has not survived genetic study: work published in 2008 identified around ten distinct clusters, and the neat three-way scheme is now understood as a considerable simplification of a much messier picture.

Two of the three names in the old scheme are still used on packaging because they are familiar, which is worth knowing when you see them.

And mostly processing

The entry on how a bean becomes a bar says that flavour is created during fermentation. That holds here with an uncomfortable consequence: two farms in the same valley, growing the same trees, fermenting differently, produce beans that taste less alike than two countries fermenting the same way.

So origin correlates with flavour largely because origin correlates with practice. The place is a proxy for what people there do, and where practice varies within a place the proxy stops working.

Blends are not the lesser thing

Blending is how a maker builds a flavour that no single bean produces, and it is a skill rather than a concealment. Some of the best bars made anywhere are blends, and saying so is unfashionable.

What blending also does is hide variation, which is why large manufacturers do it. Both facts are true and the label does not distinguish them.

What the label is genuinely good for

Traceability. A maker who can name the farm can usually tell you how the beans were fermented and dried, what they paid, and who they paid it to. Those are the questions worth asking and the label tells you whether they can be answered.

A country name on a bar from a large manufacturer usually cannot be followed any further than the country.

The word from wine, borrowed

Terroir carries in chocolate the same argument it carries in wine, and less well. Soil, climate and altitude do affect the bean, and their effect is smaller than the effect of the week the bean spent fermenting in a wooden box afterwards.

In wine the fermentation happens under a winemaker's control, usually indoors, with instruments. In chocolate it happens on a farm, and the person doing it is frequently not the person who will be credited for the flavour.

What the price is paying for

A bar that costs several times a supermarket one is paying for beans bought above the commodity price, for smaller batches, and for the fermentation to have been done carefully rather than quickly.

It is not paying for the word on the label, and a bar can carry the word and none of the rest of it.

At a table

Ask where, and then ask who fermented it. The first question is answered by the wrapper and the second separates the makers who buy beans from the ones who buy chocolate.

Neither answer tells you whether you will like the bar, which is what the piece in front of you is for.

Whether chocolate has vintages

It has harvests, and some makers print the year. The variation between years on one farm is real and is smaller than the variation between two fermentations, which puts it behind processing again.

Where a maker prints the year and can tell you how that year differed, the information is worth something. Where it is printed and nobody can say, it is decoration borrowed from wine.

Tasting origins side by side

The only way to hear what the word is claiming. Three bars from three places, same maker, similar percentage, eaten in sequence with a pause between them.

Same maker matters more than it sounds, because it holds the roasting and conching roughly constant and leaves the beans as the main variable. Comparing three origins from three makers compares the makers.

What differences actually sound like

Not the elaborate lists on the back of the packet. Broad differences in acidity, in whether the bar reads as fruity or nutty or earthy, and in how long it lasts.

Those four are noticeable by anybody on a first attempt. The rest of the vocabulary is a way of recording an impression rather than a set of things to go looking for.

The short version

The word tells you the maker can point at a place. Whether that place is a farm or a nation is not indicated, and the flavour was mostly decided by what somebody did to the beans there rather than by the place itself.

Why traceable beans cost more

Careful fermentation takes days of attention and produces a smaller, more variable crop than tipping everything into one heap. Somebody has to be paid for that attention, and the premium is what pays for it.

A maker who can name the farm can usually also tell you what they paid per tonne against the commodity price. It is an unusual question and the ones who buy this way answer it readily, because it is the part of the business they are proudest of.

Also in this part

For further context, see International Cocoa Organization growing guide.

Every ticket, every table, every hour given.

The festival exists to raise money for older people in New Hanover County: transport to medical appointments, meals delivered at home, respite for family carers, and the foster grandparent programme. That is what the wine and the chocolate are for.