Taking the chocolate test

You don’t know chocolate.

That is the message that quickly came across during a tasting tour at Alegio Chocolate in downtown Palo Alto on April 17.

“I know it’s sacrilegious, but I love milk chocolate,” said a patron visiting from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., when asked by her guide at the start what was her favorite kind of chocolate.

“The dark chocolate I’ve had is slightly bitter,” added her friend, down from San Francisco.

And that’s when the hammer came down.

“There’s no such thing as bitter chocolate,” replied Panos Panagos, looking the part of a shrewd tour guide in a getup fit for a safari: khaki shirt, wide-brimmed straw hat and a closely cropped white beard. “If you happen to buy a chocolate that is bitter … it’s not the chocolate’s fault, it’s the bean.”

Panagos, who co-owns Alegio with Robbin Everson, dates this problem back to 1908, when the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe off the coast of West Africa were the world’s largest cocoa producer. The island nation, the second-smallest and second-poorest in Africa, is also where Alegio’s chocolate is grown.

Cocoa comes from a particularly finicky tree that Panagos equates to “a spoiled kid,” and when the crop took off in the early 1900s in Africa and Latin America, growers began to cut corners in the growing process, adding genetic modification to the mix by the 1960s.

“The majority of this limited supply of cocoa trees (was) being abused, producing beans that were bitter,” said Panagos, who seems to take the violation personally. “Vanilla was the best alternative … to cover the bitterness, but what happens when you have the vanilla in the chocolate — that’s very dominantly flavored, by the way — it becomes an obstacle.

“After a while, it’s like you have a friend who repeats the same lie over and over again. It becomes the truth. … Most people today celebrate vanilla as being the flavor of chocolate.”

As testament to this, he said 95 percent of chocolate bars on the market contain vanilla — as well as soy lecithin, sugar, artificial flavors and preservatives. In many cases, cocoa butter — what Panagos calls the heart of the bean — has been at least partially removed, sold to make other products.

Halfway through the tour, he even parceled out samples from a competitor’s bar to illustrate the difference in taste, now that taste buds had been clued in.

No-frills chocolate

None of Alegio’s chocolates contain more than four ingredients, and one of its most popular bars is 100 percent pure chocolate.

“Nobody can touch our 100 percent chocolate,” Panagos said, adding, “usually, people will spit it out” when they try it during a tasting tour.

However, since Alegio began selling its chocolate online (http://alegio-chocolate.myshopify.com) a few months ago, the chocolate has become one of its best-sellers. Some customers buy 30 bars a month, not a shabby transaction, given that each box costs $26.50.

“If you have 10 grams of this in the morning and 10 grams in the afternoon, and if you happen to have high-blood pressure, it’s out the window,” Panagos said, “and it improves memory and blood circulation.”

The tour is akin to a wine tasting, not surprising given that Panagos equates growing chocolate with growing grapes to make wine. Guests are encouraged to first sniff the chocolate, then let it rest on their tongue for 30 seconds before gently rolling it around in their mouth, and cleansing their palette with water between samples.

Alegio also sells roasted cocoa beans, before the shell has been peeled away or the germ taken out.

The germ is another obstacle to chocolate’s taste, a centimeter-long, needle-thin part of the bean that even in good-quality beans is bitter. Panagos said Alegio’s chocolate grower and business partner Claudio Corallo is the only grower who discards this portion of the bean, because everything on the plantation is done by hand, and it’s too delicate an operation to be performed by a machine.

Alegio, which opened its first store in Berkeley in 2006, branched out to Palo Alto in 2013, after just one visit to the city by Corallo.

“When he came to San Francisco, the first thing … he said (was) ‘Too many people’ … but when he came here, he fell in love with Palo Alto to the point he says to me, ‘I want a little room here, a desk and a tutor. I want to learn English.’ Claudio never felt the need to learn English, but the need came very clear to him when he came to Palo Alto.”

Corallo, who visits California once a year, will be on hand for a free special event for the public at the Palo Alto store from 6 to 9 p.m. on May 8. He will also be a featured speaker at an event planned at Stanford the week of May 3, as well as a private event planned at Francis Ford Coppola Winery in Geyserville, Calif.

A renegade operation

The bare-bones packaging that graces Alegio’s products — simple cardboard boxes stamped with the name of Corallo’s plantation, a map of the island nation on the inside, and almost nothing else — acts as a fitting metaphor for the chocolate grower, who makes a point of wasting nothing in his growing process and whose business policy makes him a renegade among chocolate growers. For instance, Corallo rejects “organic” and “fair trade” labeling, arguing the terms run contrary to what they imply.

“He is a maverick,” Panagos said. “He breaks too many rules to be liked by the mainstream. That’s what attracts me (to him) the most. He thinks like I think: Who is regulating fair trade and what is fair? If you come over (to the islands), when you see how people talk to him, the respect he has over there, you understand what fair trade is. He gives work to those people.

“To me, it’s the philosophy behind these chocolates (that matters). I wouldn’t even bother talking … about chocolate if it was not for what these particular chocolates are about (because) we’re swimming in a fake world. … Every time you’re looking to buy something authentic, something that connects with nature, it doesn’t exist anymore. Everything is so much processed that you don’t know what to buy. When you buy, say, potato chips, and you look at what’s inside, it’s a whole list of ingredients that you need a magnifying glass (to read). It’s a dishonesty.”

The secret to Corallo’s success appears to be nothing more than honesty and hard work. He is heralded as the only chocolate grower who controls the entire process “from the tree to the bar,” as Panagos puts it. Time magazine in 2012 rated one of Alegio’s chocolates among the top three in the world, and the Italian version of National Geographic recently ran a 24-page spread on Corallo’s operation, in which it referred to him as “a dwarf in comparison to the ‘seven sisters,’ the corporations that control 80 percent of the world chocolate market,'” to which Corallo responded, “My (chocolates) have the flavor of the field, not the factory.”

How it began

Corallo, who is in his mid-60s, began his journey toward chocolate cultivation while in Zaire attending “Rumble in the Jungle,” the historic 1974 boxing matchup between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. An agronomist living in Florence, Italy, at the time, Corallo was hired by the government of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) to assist farming operations. He went on to purchase his own coffee plantation, producing 880 tons of high-quality coffee a year until the country began to descend into political chaos in the mid-1990s, and he was forced to flee with his wife.

In 1998, he set up camp in São Tomé and Príncipe, where along with chocolate, he grows pepper — used in Alegio’s salt-and-pepper chocolate — and a variety of coffees, some of which are also used in the chocolate. In fact, the only two things used in production that are not grown or produced on the island, according to Panagos, are “the boxes and ginger.” Even a distilled form of the pulp from cocoa pods — which is manna to capuchins that populate the islands but too sour and slimy for human consumption — made its way into one of Alegio’s top-selling chocolate bars, the Ubric 3.

Corallo employs about 300 people — all descendants of slaves brought to the islands by Portuguese to work on sugar plantations dating back to the 1500s — in an operation that is decidedly low-tech. There is no electricity on Príncipe, the smaller island, where all the cocoa beans are harvested by hand on a 180-acre plantation. After the beans are fermented and dried on racks covered in banana leaves, a process which takes about two weeks and which Panagos said Corallo performs twice as long as is standard to bring out the most flavor, they are put into sacks and sent by boat on a six-hour journey to São Tomé, 80 miles to the south, where they are roasted. Workers then separate the shell and germ from the cocoa nibs. Finally, a machine is used to ground the nibs into a paste that is then ready to be made into chocolate bars.

And what did Bonnie Levitt, the tasting tour participant from San Francisco, think of the whole experience?

“It exceeded our expectations,” she said.

Contact Kevin Kelly at kkelly@dailynewsgroup.com or 650-391-1049.