“Great chocolate and great coffee, as with great wine, needs the right soil, perfectly ripe, healthy fruit, immense care and a great deal of experience.”

A welcome from the site of Claudio Corallo (www.claudiocorallo.com/), and a deterrent to those who speak superficially about chocolate and coffee, lounging, perhaps, in an armchair in some European city.

Claudio, conversely, has hands-on experience. He spent thirty-five years of his life on African plantations. He is more than qualified to lecture and refute those who say that “100% chocolates are equally bitter.” About coffee, he adds: “The difference in fragrances of three ancient varieties of Arabica beans is unimaginable, even when they are cultivated side-by-side in the same soil and tended to in the exact same manner.”

Claudio, born in Florence in 1951, specialized in tropical agronomy at the Overseas Agronomical Institute in Florence and has been in Africa since 1974. He left with his wife and children for Sao Tomé, off the coast of Africa and founded a family business which is undaunted by competition from other multinational businesses.

The Claudio Corallo’s secret of success is not only the nobility of the cacao plant, but also the painstaking care throughout the production process.

Claudio and his sons transform the cacao beans into the purest form of chocolate.

“The result obtained with this treatment” explains Corallo “is so far removed from the mediocre mass-produced chocolate that it is hard to imagine. Many chocolatiers offer ‘Gran Cru,’ flavored with cane sugar and vanilla. We don’t, because for us, the flavor of our chocolate is more than enough.

They offer a broad range of chocolates, including a 100% chocolate along with another specialty, the only distillate in the world extracted from the cacao pulp. Other chocolates include a 73% cacao with cacao nibs, delicate chocolates with ginger or orange peel and 80% sablé with grains of coffee.

From their plantations on this beautiful equatorial island, the Corallo family sells chocolate and coffee to the local market. A small percentage is sold to connoisseurs around the world.

Claudio looks after the plantations and production with his two sons Niccolò and Amedeo, while their sister Ricciarda and their mother Bettina deal with the commercial side.

Ultimately, it is the story of a family who, on a quest for high-quality chocolate and coffee, introduced technology developed through over thirty years of experience in the jungles of ex-Zaire and Bolivia. All of this followed by the discovery of the oldest cacao plant in Africa, on the island of Principe.

So how did you set out on this adventure?

It all started in 1986. At the time I was cultivating coffee in ex-Zaire, today the Democratic Republic of Congo. My brother-in-law rekindled my interest in cacao. Up until 1996 I was investigating what it takes to make a good espresso. I had acquired two abandoned plantations in order to recuperate varieties had nearly disappeared.

It appears that with coffee you revolutionized numerous techniques!

Look, with coffee, just as with cacao, it’s not the roasting that makes the difference. It’s the choice of plants, tremendous work in the fields harvesting the fruit and the methods (perhaps only our methods) of removing the pulp.

Please, go on…

During the eighties things went very well. I employed a thousand people and my coffee was even served in the historic local ‘Florian di Venezia.’

And then?

Then there was a difficult period. Wars and looting forced me to leave the plantations. I traveled 1,650 kilometers by canoe on rivers that were unusually deserted.

Was that when you got started with cacao?

I transferred to the Central African state of Sao Tomé and Principe, an archipelago in the Guinea Gulf.

And what happened?

We conducted numerous tests. We woke up at four in the morning to achieve a different kind of production, something that makes you truly savor the flavor of this place. We also ensured that it was, in all respects, sustainable and modified cultivation techniques.

In what way?

We introduced some innovations, such as putting five to six meters of space between one plant and another which offered them greater protection so we could avoid the use of pesticides, working manually and fermenting from nine to seventeen days, followed by constant temperature checks. We even built a roasting machine. Today it takes up to sixty people for the sorting and shelling of cacao alone, all carried out by hand. We currently employ around 150 people. Our revenue last year was 360 million Euros.

But why did you leave Europe?

Because here I live far away from the chaos and superficiality. I get angry when I hear people who lack expertise talk. The know-how only comes from living on the plantations, taking in the smells of these places that are still virgin.

Interview by Cinzia Ficco

cinzia.ficco@virgilio.it