Episode Transcript
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0:15
To get to Vulcan Lehman's compound in the Amazon
0:18
kept really want together there. For
0:20
me, that involved a red eye from Miami
0:23
to Santa Cruz, Olivia's biggest city, then
0:25
a puddle jumper to a town called Trinidad,
0:28
a sweaty night there, and then nine
0:31
grueling hours in a collectivo taxi
0:34
squeeze between farm hands and crying
0:36
babies, hammering over washboard
0:38
rows at thirty miles per hour, which is about
0:40
twenty miles per hour too fast. At
0:43
last, I got dropped off at Vulkar's place.
0:47
Hello. Hello, it's
0:49
changed since my visit twelve years ago. For our river
0:51
trip. Folcus built himself a crazy
0:53
new house, all screen, no walls.
0:57
A few feet away, there's an out house with tree
0:59
frogs in the toilet, a workshop
1:01
with a generator, and a big greenhouse for fermenting
1:03
cacao. There's papayetrees
1:05
and bananas, and a tiny white local
1:08
chili called goose anita. It looks
1:10
like little worms. They're brutally
1:12
hot. The vulgar munches them like popcorn.
1:15
Surrounding it all, of course, are the cocaudries,
1:18
acres of them. Poker calls
1:20
the place tranquila DoD. It means tranquility
1:23
in Spanish, and most of the time
1:26
the name fits most
1:28
of the time. So um, if you
1:30
can, you runt down all the things to
1:32
watch out for. I'm wandering around.
1:35
I always tell the people
1:37
when they come, please don't touch anything. I
1:41
think National
1:43
Geographic and all Animal planet they
1:46
give a false perspective. There
1:48
are people, you know, gripping crocodiles
1:50
and snakes and whatnot, and so
1:52
don't touch the crocodiles or the snakes.
1:55
Is in general, there's
1:58
actually a lot of crocodiles, not a touch.
2:00
The place is filled with them.
2:02
Technically, the ones in the Amazon are called caymans,
2:05
not crocodiles, but I know a
2:07
crocodile smile when I see one. The
2:09
big ones in Bolivia can be more than twelve ft
2:12
long, and Folkers says to stay
2:14
away from them because they like to
2:16
charge people. But the smaller
2:18
ones, well, he's caught a five footer
2:21
in honor of our reunion, and now
2:23
he's prepping it for dinner. We have like
2:26
rips and tail. The
2:28
tail will eat raw with lime juice like svich.
2:31
The ribs get fried not too long, so
2:33
it stays juicy inside, its wanderful.
2:37
When you're talking about wild chocolate. This
2:39
is ground zero. Tranquilidad
2:41
is where the movement was born. The beans
2:43
from these trees produced the first run of Cruise
2:46
Savage and set off the gold rush to find
2:48
more last ca cow with wicked new flavors.
2:50
I've come to work the harvest, to learn the arts
2:53
of picking and fermenting, to understand
2:55
on a deeper level, where great chocolate
2:57
comes from.
3:04
The Last time I was here a dozen years ago, the
3:06
trip had gone from bad to absurd, but
3:08
it ended well. Volker lined up lots
3:11
of new sources of cacao. Cruise Evage
3:13
was a hit, and Volker became a legend
3:15
in the fine chocolate community. And
3:17
then something went
3:20
terribly wrong. I've only heard
3:22
the details from a distance, but just like
3:24
those golden pods, were cursed. Yeah.
3:32
I had no intention to dig into
3:35
this jungle. Actually, I
3:37
I fell into the trap. It
3:42
was just looking for some stupid
3:45
kaka in the forest. I wasn't even
3:47
planning on this. Yeah,
3:50
well you'll
3:53
see what happened. For
3:59
thirty years, has been chasing that grail, always
4:01
believing it was one step away, always
4:04
believing that with just a little more organization,
4:07
the Amazon would fall into place. And
4:12
of course he was just the latest in a long
4:14
line of outsiders to believe that he
4:16
could make sense of the chaos, from
4:18
the Spanish gold hunters and the Jesuits,
4:22
to the rubber barons of the eight hundreds and
4:25
they explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared
4:27
in Still Seeking
4:29
the Lost City of z And
4:31
to the characters in Werner Herzog's Amazon
4:33
films, and even Herzog himself,
4:36
who seems to have gone at least partially insane
4:38
trying to make those movies. What
4:41
are your plans when this movie is all over? What are you gonna
4:43
be doing? I
4:45
shouldn't make movies anymore. Should
4:49
go to a lunatic asylum right
4:51
away. These
4:54
dreamers always think they're close, and
4:57
every time the same thing happens
4:59
there, attempts to make it work on their terms
5:02
fail. From
5:06
Kaleidoscope and I Heeart podcasts. This
5:09
is Obsessions, Wild Chocolate.
5:11
I'm Roman Jacobson, Chapter
5:15
two, Olivia for Dummies. Long
5:28
before he ever saw a cowpot, Volker
5:30
Lehman was a little boy in Berlin with a green thumb.
5:33
His father was an army veteran and a coal miner
5:35
battling exhaustion and PTSD.
5:38
So he came from work and then he
5:40
went for one or two hours into the garden.
5:43
Yeah, and that helped him also
5:45
to maybe forget
5:47
a little about about the harsh
5:50
conditions in the coal mine. By
5:53
the time he was five, Folker was gardening
5:55
right alongside him. I had to pull
5:57
out the weeds and well,
6:00
sometimes I missed and put on the
6:02
carrots.
6:05
Education, but he never much liked the German
6:08
climate. After high school, he took
6:10
a trip to Latin America and compared
6:12
to the gray horizons of post war Germany,
6:15
it was like stepping into a technicolor wonderland.
6:18
I was intrigued by the climb, at the
6:20
music, the food. It's like
6:22
you feel friendly. But
6:24
it wasn't just the culture around farming. Volka
6:27
was amazed by the power of tropical plants,
6:29
the way they grew so ferociously, and
6:31
the incredible amount of food and medicine they could
6:33
produce. One he
6:36
decided to devote his life to them.
6:38
He knocked around the tropics for a few years doing
6:40
development work, and by the nineties
6:42
he'd found his way to Bolivia. The German
6:44
government had a program to try to get Bolivia's
6:46
farmers to switch from coca to
6:49
less controversial crops, and Vulgar's
6:51
job was to teach the farmers how to work with the
6:53
new ones. Bolivians consider
6:55
coca their most sacred plant. The leaves
6:58
are chewed daily for stamina and
7:00
stimulation, but they're also the source
7:02
of cocaine. And the ninety nineties
7:04
Olivia was awash and the stuff. Folker
7:09
told me about those strange days as we sat
7:11
in his jungle home. No, but Santa
7:13
Cruz was like Carnival
7:16
in real seven actually
7:19
on Bolivia, and Santa Cruz was the
7:22
expansion project from
7:24
the Colombians because
7:26
they needed more for you, you know that
7:29
is you being meat being
7:32
America. They needed more cocaine
7:35
to feed our insatiable appetite, more
7:37
than they could produce in Columbia, right, right,
7:40
So first they moved into Peru, and
7:43
then that wasn't enough. Then they moved
7:45
over and to
7:47
to Bolivia. People are coming
7:49
from Columbia by plane, small planes,
7:52
bringing even their bands with bringing
7:55
the band. Yeah, yes,
7:57
you heard that right. If you're a Colombian drug
8:00
hiller on the Bolivian range, how do you party
8:02
without your local tunes. There
8:09
was a small town, Santa Ananda, Yukuma,
8:12
which was then the hot spot. And
8:15
did you ever have to worry about crossing those
8:17
guys? So sometimes you sit next to one and
8:19
he would not he would invite you. Oh you're
8:21
American, you know where you come from. He wants to
8:23
know where we are if you're not from d A
8:25
right right, And then he he puts
8:28
a bottle of whiskey into you. And then you start
8:30
singing, you know, and and then he
8:32
he says, oh, this this guy is harmless.
8:35
So as Volker continued his work,
8:37
he found himself caught between his new friends,
8:40
the farmers and the d e a. Santa
8:42
ana was known as a ranching town, but it was
8:44
also the heart of Olivia's cocaine network, because,
8:48
as it turned out, the ranchers and the traffickers
8:51
could be one and the same. Because
8:53
when you have a farm, when you have a farm
8:55
here, you don't have a plane, yeah normally
8:57
and now to over watch anty
9:01
hectares and
9:04
and you have to travel no roads.
9:07
The natural thing is to buy
9:09
yourself as cessna. Then
9:11
the pilot can transport some some packages.
9:14
You know what means, you know, makes some side
9:16
business, and of course that side
9:19
business turned out to be a lot more lucrative than
9:21
cattle. Soon Bolivia's ranchers
9:23
were saddle deep in the drug business,
9:25
and everyone knew it. On the night of
9:27
June, the
9:29
d e A took action. Dozens
9:31
of helicopters carrying hundreds of anti drug
9:33
agents from Bolivia and the United States swooped
9:36
down on Santana. According
9:38
to the d e A, agents destroyed
9:40
fifteen cocaine labs hidden in the little
9:42
town and confiscated dozens of planes
9:44
along with hundreds of kilos of coke. But
9:47
they met stiff resistance from the townspeople, who
9:49
stormed the airport and surrounded the helicopters,
9:52
chanting kill the Yankees, leaving
9:54
no uncertainty as to where their loyalties lay.
9:58
Vulgar tried hard to persuade farmers to switch crops,
10:00
but eventually he burned out bananas,
10:03
pineapple, hearts of palm.
10:05
None of the alternative crops could ever compete
10:07
with cocamine. He
10:11
felt useless, so he went back
10:13
to his original obsession, studying the
10:15
local plants, and before long he
10:18
was searching the rainforest for the next big
10:20
thing, a plant with global appeal,
10:23
Like a vegetal talent scout. He needed
10:25
a buzzy new client, and he
10:28
found one. But it wasn't cocao,
10:30
not yet. It was brazil nuts,
10:33
one of the great treats of the Amazon. The
10:35
territory of Bolivia was always the main
10:38
source of the main spot of the brazil
10:41
nuts. Always because
10:43
Brazil chopped theres down or even before no,
10:46
it's yeah and um.
10:48
The nuts were always sold through Brazil
10:51
and this is why they called brazil nuts. But they always
10:53
came from Bolivia. Bolivia nuts really yeah.
10:56
Brazil Nut trees are these giants of the rainforest,
10:59
towering over the rest of the canopy. They
11:01
have these little coconuts the size of bocci balls
11:03
clinging to their trunks, and each one is filled
11:05
with delicious nuts. The trees are
11:07
kind of perfect for developing a rainforest economy,
11:10
wild, sustainable, delicious,
11:13
but on their own they aren't exactly
11:15
a big ticket item. Bulker needed
11:17
a sex air product, and he thought he might have
11:19
the perfect candidate, a lady from the
11:22
Chimana tribe. She showed
11:24
me in the wild cacao. A
11:26
few years earlier. Bulker had been exploring the jungle
11:28
for valuable new plants. The natural
11:30
people to ask where the Shimani, a group of hunter
11:33
gatherers who still lived off the wild,
11:35
and one old Shimani woman in particular, was
11:38
known for her expertise. That friend introduced
11:41
me. Ah, he said, I
11:43
I know Chimana and
11:45
they have some cacaw that might be of
11:47
your interest. Let's go, and
11:50
not just any cacao, wild cacao,
11:53
something Vulka had never come across in his development
11:55
work. So they went to the forest and
11:57
found the old woman. She lived in intent
12:00
made from sticks and palm thatch, and
12:02
she knew all the useful plants in the forest. They
12:04
still can see her, you
12:07
know, she was really tiny. They
12:09
asked if she could show them the wild cocow and she
12:11
said sure, and she led them down
12:13
a footpath into the forest. So we were
12:15
walking and I was behind
12:17
her sawing. I saw
12:20
her hair like a nest,
12:22
and her hair was
12:25
a little monkey. It was a
12:27
little pet monkey. And Falker could
12:29
not stop looking at it. There are tiny
12:31
monkeys her right, and
12:34
she got one, and I
12:36
was following her and looking at the monkey all
12:38
the time, and all of a sudden, she
12:40
she stopped and showed me
12:43
a cow tree. And
12:54
here it is the argent moment of
12:56
the man who's going to make wild chocolate famous.
12:59
In the Hollywood version of this tale, the
13:01
wise woman hands him the yellow pod and
13:04
he stares transfixed, like Indiana
13:06
Jones gazing at the golden idol. Here
13:09
is the answer. He seeks, the thing that is going
13:11
to bring sustainable agriculture to the Amazon
13:14
and transform the world of chocolate. Does
13:16
he break open the pod, sniff the
13:18
fragrant seeds, and hold it up like
13:20
the Holy Grail. I wasn't
13:22
really interested in the tree much,
13:25
really, so oh, yeah, I
13:27
see colcohol. Okay,
13:31
Nope. All he could think about was the monkey.
13:34
And then my friend said, yeah, do
13:36
you think this is something? I said, I
13:38
have no idea,
13:42
But he tucked the experience away in the back of his mind,
13:45
and when he was searching for a sexy partner to
13:47
inrobe his Brazilian nuts, he unpacked
13:49
it. And we will too after
13:52
the break, Welcome
14:13
back to wild Chocolate. So
14:16
we we put this Oh
14:19
what oh you call this? What's
14:21
what's greater? Greater? Yeah?
14:26
In La Paz and Santa Cruz and the other
14:28
cities of Bolivia. You see rustic chocolate
14:30
for sale in the markets, grainy brown
14:32
patties shaped my hand, just like he'saly
14:34
in Mexico. It's an old tradition
14:37
in Bolivia, and they used stone on
14:39
stone blinders. Yeah, so that's how
14:41
it's still done here. This
14:44
is the same, maybe fifty
14:47
years ago. Amazing. But
14:50
if you bite into one of these patties by itself,
14:52
you're in for a bad time. Some of
14:54
it tastes burnt, some tastes
14:56
like blue cheese, and it all crumbles
14:59
like dirt. For the locals,
15:01
that doesn't really matter because it all gets
15:03
drunk. Is hot chocolate with enough sugar to cover
15:05
up any off flavors. For
15:08
Vulcan, though, this chocolate wouldn't cut it.
15:10
There was no way he could cut his precious brazil
15:12
nuts and this stuff and pass it off as a gourmet
15:15
item. He needed better chocolate, but
15:18
he couldn't find any. He considered
15:20
giving up on the whole idea, but
15:23
then he found a tiny, run down chocolate
15:25
shop in a back alley of Lapase. The
15:28
proprietor was an eighty five year old Jewish
15:30
man who could escape the Warsaw Ghetto during
15:32
World War two. And he he was like
15:35
a very traditional chocolate lover
15:38
and had a small um
15:40
choco factory. Jewish
15:46
artisans have been at the heart of Europ's chocolate
15:48
making tradition since the days of the Spanish court,
15:51
and this old guy knew the traditional well. When
15:53
Vulgar tasted his chocolate, he could not believe
15:56
his daste buds. It was not
15:59
terrible, but why Vulker
16:02
put the questions to him, and it turned
16:04
out the guy was doing what European chocolate
16:06
makers have always done when stuck with funky beans.
16:09
They beat the warm coco mass for hour after
16:11
hour in a machine to blow off
16:14
as much of the off flavors as possible.
16:16
It wasn't perfect, but it was enough for
16:18
Vulca to get his first real sense of the beans
16:21
behind the funk, and he liked what he sensed.
16:24
Behind the char and the cheese, there
16:26
was something beautiful at
16:30
heart. Vulcan is an engineer. When he sees
16:32
a system, he thinks he's running poorly, that
16:35
could be so much better with just a few
16:37
tweaks. He can't resist. So
16:40
now he couldn't help wonder if the funk
16:42
was built into the beans, or if there was a way
16:44
to get the beauty without the beast, And
16:47
there was only one way to answer that. He
16:49
had to go to the source, and that meant
16:51
a scruffy town called Trinidad, where
16:53
everything the jungle produced, from cocaw
16:55
to cocaine could be found for sale.
16:58
Tread is Uh is the center
17:01
of trade, and then people
17:04
running up and down the river with and
17:07
and doing batta batta
17:09
business. Traders would spend weeks
17:11
in the jungle and then paddle into Trinidad
17:13
to so other goods like the rice
17:15
and and everything you need because
17:17
there's no there's no money system.
17:20
No, it was easier. It was easier than
17:23
you know. Give me, would give me bananas,
17:25
give me cocoa and and or
17:28
whatever you have, and what the
17:30
market accepts then turn into
17:33
money. Cacao
17:35
is money basically. So
17:37
Volka flew to Trinidad. He started
17:40
hanging out, getting another locals asking
17:42
questions, but how do you how do you even do that?
17:45
No, you just ask around. I
17:48
was talking to more elderly people
17:51
because they were telling me better
17:53
the story. So I was sitting with them
17:55
having tea and chats.
17:58
Yeah, and then a little by
18:01
little I got the picture. Most
18:03
of the cacao was coming from a town called Ballets.
18:06
Barrets was truly at the end of the earth, days
18:08
from Trinidad by river, but of
18:11
course, like every other town in the Cocaine
18:13
So lowlands, it had an airstrip. So
18:15
Volka hired a plane and headed for it, never
18:18
guessing how much his life was about to change.
18:21
There was no route, no
18:24
electricity, nothing,
18:27
no, no, not even for nothing.
18:30
We were talking on on on shortwave
18:33
radio. As he got to
18:35
do the people in Bowrets, the picture got
18:37
even clearer. And that picture,
18:40
well, he almost had to pinch himself.
18:43
The cocat was coming from islands of high grounds
18:46
scattered across the wetlands, natural
18:48
terraces that didn't get drowned during the four months
18:50
rainy seasons. The locals called
18:52
these forest islands Chocolatales.
18:55
It was always harvested and used
18:58
for local chocolate in Yeah,
19:02
but on a very very low price, and
19:04
during the wet season when the cacao was ripe,
19:07
families would travel to the chocolate tales by
19:09
canoe. The journey alone could
19:11
take days. Then they camp in the
19:13
forest for months, picking the pods, opening
19:16
them and drawing the beans on mats
19:18
in the sun. Then they'd sell the beans
19:20
back in town, But the tradition
19:22
was dying in Bolivious cities.
19:24
People were switching over to powdered cocoa mix,
19:26
which was easier to use. Prices
19:28
for the wild cacao were too low to
19:31
justify the work. The kids were less
19:33
interested, so the people were starting to
19:35
give up on the yearly trips. Many
19:37
of the chocolate tallies had been abandoned, a
19:39
few had been cut down for cattle grazing. It
19:42
didn't take long for Volker to understand why the quality
19:44
was bad. Two essential steps to
19:46
making great beans are pretty darn
19:48
hard to do in the Amazon. Drawing
19:51
beans in the rainforest without a shelter of
19:53
any kind is impossible. Many
19:55
of the beans were moldy, and even the ones
19:57
that weren't moldy had very little chocolate
19:59
flavor. Fresh cacao beans
20:01
are naturally bitter and a stringer. They
20:03
have to be heaped together with their sugary pulp for
20:06
days and fermented to transform
20:08
those nasty flavors into chocolate
20:10
ones. Unfortunately, most
20:13
of the people in the world harvest in cacao don't
20:15
have the time, expertise, or facilities
20:18
to do it. Properly, and that was the case in Bolivia,
20:21
and that spoke to Vulcar's engineer Soul.
20:24
A little training and infrastructure, a
20:26
micro dose of good old German organization
20:29
could make all the difference. All
20:32
he needed was to see just how much cacao
20:34
was out there and if it was at all feasible
20:37
to improve the fermenting and drying. But
20:40
getting around the roadless jungle was
20:42
brutal. There were certain islands
20:45
I wanted to go to, so I had
20:47
to find a horse and a guide. Set
20:49
on the horse. After two hours, I couldn't
20:52
I couldn't feel my legs anymore. And
20:56
and after six
20:58
hours I couldn't feel anything anymore.
21:00
You know, I was like I was in
21:03
full pain. Days on the range
21:05
in the sun, battling heat and bugs
21:08
the horses they attract
21:10
also all kinds of flies
21:13
that sting and suck your blood,
21:16
and so you're fighting
21:18
with the horse together. You're no not
21:20
not to leave too much blood
21:23
every day, you know, when you're there,
21:26
I were seeing all kinds of things
21:28
on the horizon from
21:30
from the heat. What kind of things do you say
21:34
when you look at the horizon, Then you see
21:36
water? And then I saw all
21:39
kinds of animals,
21:41
and there wasn't anything. But finally
21:44
they made it to the forest island and the shade
21:46
of the chocolate all we went forward
21:48
with the machetta and in the inner
21:51
part it lifted up, and
21:53
it was like the trees were standing
21:55
in a nice distance to
21:57
each other and in
22:00
harmony somehow, at which
22:02
point he was like, fuck the brazil nuts.
22:04
I want to make this cacao famous. He
22:07
wondered if he was staring at the greatest development opportunity
22:09
of his career. If the international market
22:11
got excited about wild cacao, the beans
22:14
would command much more money, the pickers
22:16
could make a living, the tradition would survive,
22:18
and the chocolate tales could be preserved. He
22:21
couldn't quite see how the numbers were going to work,
22:24
but he knew it was an hour never. As
22:28
Volker continued to explore the region by foot,
22:30
boat and horseback, he fell under
22:33
its spell. Vast wetlands
22:35
with hundred mile views, lush
22:37
rain for us, more wildlife
22:39
than he'd ever seen, McCaw's
22:42
cappa, bara's weaver birds,
22:44
jaguars, and tons of cacao
22:47
just waiting to be properly fermented. And
22:50
then came the moment that whipped the trajectory
22:52
of his life in a new and unexpected
22:55
direction. Somebody said,
22:57
hey, there's a place on
22:59
say are you interested?
23:02
Actually, it hit a
23:05
long term
23:07
wish you not to by by
23:09
peaceful land. Yeah, to have
23:11
my own farm maybe and
23:13
in and maybe
23:16
have a succure place when the
23:19
world goes to hell. You know, well
23:22
it didn't go to hell, but eventually
23:25
it will tranquility.
23:31
After the break,
23:51
I want to taste of some of this god level chocolate
23:53
we got you covered. Kaleidoscope
23:55
has joined forces with Louise Abram and Statler's Chocolate
23:58
to make a special box to go along with the very
24:00
podcast. Now you could sample of flavors
24:02
from the banks of the Amazon without having to fight off
24:04
jaguars and Anagonda's. Just visit
24:07
www. Dot Stetler Dash Chocolate
24:10
dot com to order your Wild Chocolate today.
24:12
Check the link in the show notes. You're
24:22
listening to Wild Chocolate. I
24:24
think that's it. That's yeah.
24:27
We stopped because we can get
24:29
lost. Bulker
24:31
and I are walking in tranquily Dot in
24:34
the chocolate hall he bought all those years ago.
24:37
It's shady and warm and
24:39
still the ground is smooth
24:41
with waxy leaves. The trunks of the
24:43
co cow trees are spaced evenly apart, like
24:45
the columns of some temple. There's
24:50
one, two, three,
24:53
four, five or
24:56
whatever. Yeah, amazing,
24:58
Yeah, and spacing. It
25:01
looks like that somebody you know measured
25:03
the spacing. You could
25:05
actually think about, Hey, somebody planted
25:08
these trees. You know they
25:11
are in a room. No,
25:14
it's just just a natural pattern. So
25:18
not planted, but maybe
25:20
not entirely natural, depending
25:22
on how you define natural. Bulker has
25:25
a theory. I say there
25:27
was a hunter and he had
25:29
a coco pot, and
25:31
he was sucking on the beans,
25:34
and every ten steps he spit
25:36
out the beans and sucks a dam. And
25:39
ten steps later and he sucked
25:42
and he spit out the dam. This
25:45
is what you always do when you walk through a chocolate holl
25:47
You absolut mindedly grab a pod, split
25:49
it open, and scoop a goopy handful of
25:51
white palpon's ease into your mouth. Yeah,
25:57
as you walk, you suck the juice off the
25:59
sea eats. The flavor is sweet and
26:01
tart, deliciously refreshing in the
26:04
heat of the jungle. Then you spit out
26:06
the seeds and grab another pod, and
26:08
your walk gets a little bit nicer. People
26:11
have been making that beautiful sound for ten
26:13
thousand years, and wherever you hear
26:15
it, a baby cocou try is
26:17
born. No
26:24
bulker paid a visit to the chocolates hall that was
26:26
for sale. It was huge, magical.
26:30
He followed footpaths through the woods where
26:33
generations of people had picked cocao. He
26:36
opened a pod and tasted the juice.
26:39
Monkeys chattered at him from the trees. The
26:42
ground was nice and high, unlikely to
26:44
flood. He knew if he didn't
26:46
buy it, the next buyer would probably
26:48
clear the forest. And something
26:50
tugged at him.
26:53
So he came up with ten thousand dollars and
26:55
bought it on the spot. And
26:58
then it was time to test his theory of
27:00
these beans really make great chocolate. He
27:02
picks some pods for many of the beans as
27:05
well as he knew how, and made them
27:07
into chocolate. It has almost
27:09
no bitterness. It's it
27:11
has a sweetness um
27:15
somehow between floral
27:18
and and dark
27:22
dark of fruits and and
27:24
it and it goes back and forth. There's
27:26
nothing really that compares the
27:30
the overall flavors and
27:32
the spectrum of different
27:34
flavors during the time you
27:37
have it in your mouth. There's nothing
27:39
you know that, there's nothing like this. The
27:45
rest seemed simple. He'd
27:47
make the world's most beautiful beans and bring
27:49
the chocolate industry to Bolivia's doorstep.
27:52
And you live right here. And
27:54
here's where things get a little bit cosmic. As
27:57
he cleared a patch of ground to build a house out
28:00
of the red earth, gave a clay pot, and
28:03
then another and another. They
28:05
were beautiful, with fluted necks
28:07
and intricate etched patterns, and
28:10
they were a thousand years old. As
28:14
Bulker kept digging, the treasures kept coming.
28:17
One day at tranquiladd he showed them to
28:19
me. They saw, volunteer,
28:22
there's an X, two different
28:25
xes. That's a beauty. Yeah,
28:28
they have strings attached, and
28:30
then we're hanging. This
28:33
is actually a toy. It
28:36
was a doll, probably
28:39
for a kid to play with. Amazing.
28:44
The artifacts were the remnants of an ancient settlement.
28:47
Soon archaeologists visited. Chocolatelles
28:50
were part of a massive network of earthen platforms,
28:53
terraces, pyramids, causeways
28:56
and canals. This network
28:58
stretched across thousands of square aisles.
29:01
So this part of the Amazon wasn't just primorial
29:03
wilderness. It was the overgrown
29:05
orchards and plazas and streets of
29:08
a sophisticated culture known as the Casarabe,
29:11
and a thousand years ago their
29:13
civilization was hopping, probably
29:17
a couple of million people living here um
29:20
pre Columbia. I think the largest
29:25
community of native people
29:28
in the Amazon were in this
29:31
part of Olivia and Brazil. This
29:33
may have been the source of rumors about the lost
29:35
city of z The
29:39
Casarabe civilization disappeared around
29:41
the year four for unknown reasons,
29:44
but one thing we know about them is that they
29:46
loved cacao. The reason
29:48
Tranquilidad and the other chocolate till lives
29:50
are filled with coco trees is because
29:52
for hundreds of years the people who lived
29:54
there were eating cacao and spitting out
29:57
the seats. Some of
29:59
the trees today are the same tree as the Casarabe
30:01
used. Jean Kiladad was, in
30:03
a sense a ghost island of
30:06
ancient beings for
30:12
the entire ecosystem. It's
30:15
it's a very very valuable
30:17
tree. It doesn't die, it survives
30:20
droughts, flooding, and
30:23
on top of it brings
30:25
us the foot of the gods. H
30:29
He set up the artifacts on a little altar in
30:31
the corner of his house, and he began
30:33
thinking of himself as just a small part
30:36
of a larger story. The place was talent.
30:38
He basically, I see it not as
30:40
an owner. I see it
30:42
as a piece of land that nature
30:44
gives it to me for a certain certain
30:47
amount of time. But I would
30:49
leave it as as fast
30:51
as a cat. Vulker
30:56
needed the partner with a chocolate maker, so he
30:58
began taking the beans to trade shows. But
31:00
every buyer he met looked at him like he
31:03
was crazy. I said, I have wild
31:05
cocol and they said, there's not such
31:07
a thing. And I said,
31:09
there is wild coco in the Amazon. No,
31:12
no coco comes from Micador. Okay.
31:17
And they were not alone, right, I assume no
31:19
that everybody. Everybody was ignorant. Everybody.
31:22
He finally got the attention of felsh Lean, a famous
31:24
old Swiss chocolate house. Felsh Len
31:26
was competing with the top French companies in the gourmet
31:28
chocolate world, and it was always on the hunt
31:31
for something that would set it apart from its rivals. The
31:34
buyer asked for a sample of the beans to test
31:36
in their lab in Switzerland. So Volcas
31:38
sent off the beans right away, that thing he'd
31:40
been chasing for years. He could almost
31:42
taste it. But what if
31:44
he was wrong? What if the beans weren't a special
31:47
at He thought, No on
31:49
that point, he drushed it himself and
31:52
he was right. Soon felsh Lean
31:54
asked for another four d key Lows so they could
31:57
run some test batches on the big equipment. Oh
31:59
yeah, as he said, no problem, absolutely.
32:02
Then he walked outside and stared into
32:05
his chocolates hall and wondered how
32:07
the hell he was going to do that. He
32:10
spent two sweaty months in the jungle, picking
32:12
by hand. He worked on the dusk
32:14
until he personally harvested a ton of
32:17
fresh decao. Then he fermented
32:19
it and dried it as best he could and
32:21
sent it to Switzerland. Then
32:24
he crossed his fingers and waited and
32:27
waited, and finally the
32:29
call came, could he please come to Switzerland
32:32
for a meeting. So he cleaned himself up
32:34
and crossed the Atlantic and
32:37
they were like, yeah, we want this. It
32:40
was smooth and rich and
32:43
it's very distinct. And this is also something
32:46
fresh Lean told told me. The chocolate
32:48
is clearly distinct and
32:51
this is what we are interested, don't
32:53
know. And then came the big question, how
32:56
many talks and and then
32:59
I was like, um, I
33:03
don't know. He
33:07
really didn't know. He had no clue how much
33:09
he could get his hands on and ferment properly
33:12
but fecially, and said, get us as much as
33:14
you can. We want it all. They
33:16
had big plans for this Cacao. They wanted to
33:18
make a whole new bar, unlike any that had been made
33:20
before the world's first wild
33:22
bar. They already had a name for it, Crew
33:26
Savage. That bar
33:28
was going to blow the staid world of chocolate
33:31
wide open, and it
33:33
would take Vulgar Layman on a wild ride.
33:35
It would make him famous, but it would
33:37
also nearly destroy him. That's
33:42
still to come. I'll
33:48
always remember something Vulgar said to me when
33:50
he was recounting the parade of dreamers who
33:52
had marched into the Amazon over the centuries
33:54
seeking gold and glory. There's
33:56
no Olivia for dummies, he said, many
33:59
people will have lost their fortunes here. Well,
34:02
he couldn't have known when he said it was
34:05
that he was going to be next. Look
34:07
on the phase of your wife saying
34:09
there's no money. What do you mean by
34:12
there's no money? There was
34:14
the oldest money, yeah, but now there's no more
34:16
money. Man. You must have been furious
34:18
at a lot of people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah No
34:21
with a gun in my hand that would have killed some people.
34:23
Maybe, yeah. Yeah.
34:33
On the next episode of Wild Chocolate,
34:35
I could feel myself falling down Mr rabbit
34:37
Hole. Sometimes I talked about chocolate
34:40
like music and this was like you classic
34:42
symphony orchestra, justst beautiful,
34:45
the Vatican of Chocolate. I got five
34:48
fifty bars on the shelf modeling.
34:50
These young Italians show up and
34:52
we've heard all sorts of things that you know, somebody got
34:54
shot over this and d Wild
34:59
Chock It is a Kaleidoscope production with I Heart
35:02
Podcasts, hosted and reported by me Rowan
35:04
Jacobson and produced by Shane McKeon
35:06
at Nice Mormaint Media, Edited by
35:08
Kate Osborne and mangesh Hada Kudor,
35:11
Sound design and mixing by Soundboard. Original
35:14
music composition by Spencer Stevenson, a
35:16
k. A. Botany production help
35:18
from Baheeny Shorty from My Heart.
35:20
Our executive producers are Katrina Norvell and
35:23
Nikki Etor. Special thanks to Laura
35:25
Mayor, Costaslinos Oswalash
35:28
and Aaron Coffman, Will Pearson,
35:30
codel Burn, Bob Pittman, Daria
35:32
Daniel and the team at Stetler who are helping
35:34
us make a very special chocolate of our own. That's
35:37
right, We're working with Louisa at others
35:39
to protect the rainforest and make delicious
35:41
Amazonian chocolate. Visit www
35:45
dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com
35:47
to taste it for yourself. That's www
35:50
dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot
35:53
com. And if you want to hear more of
35:55
this type of content, nothing is more important
35:57
to the creators here a Kaleidoscope than subscriber
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ratings and reviews. Please spread
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the lave wherever you listen. M
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