Finca la Rioja Mexico: A fantastic two-harvest dual pack of bars by Chocolate Naive

A month or two ago, I ordered some chocolate from one of my favourite online retailers: The Chocolate Project in Victoria, British Colombia. I was ordering some Goodnow Farms chocolate and discovered they had the new Mexico-origin Bonnat dark-milk 65% bar. That started an email conversation with Stephanie, a chocolate connoisseur and a fellow chocolate maker who works at The Chocolate Project, about other Mexico-origin bars that they carry. She put a package together for my order, and I was pleasantly surprised when I opened it and found the Chocolate Naïve duo pack of Mexico origin chocolate bars.

The cacao used to make the chocolate in both bars is from the same small farm in Coahoatian, Chiapas, Mexico called Finca la Rioja. But each bar was made from cacao of a different harvest time.

Why is the time of harvest so important?
The climate at different times of the year can affect the flavour of the cacao. As we commonly know, warm countries where cacao grows (within 20 degrees of the equator), tend to have wet and rainy seasons and dry seasons, and these changes can affect the harvest.  And although the flavours are very similar in the cacao, there are subtle differences that can offer the taster a unique experience with each bar.

 

Have you ever noticed a flavour change with a change of harvest in other chocolate bars? I have had this opportunity in chocolate tasting when I received a wonderful lesson from Fresco Chocolate once on harvest, by way of the Peru Maranon cocoa beans. Also, I've noticed that the most recent Dick Taylor Madagascar bar that I purchased tasted more of tangy raisin than the fresh red berry flavour that I recall tasting when I first bought it several years ago. You see this with cocoa beans when making chocolate, but opportunities for the average chocolate consumer to taste the flavour of chocolate made from different harvests is rare. Perhaps a dedicated chocolate connoisseur could devote a cupboard to buying and saving chocolate bars from the same craft chocolate maker over different years, but who has the time and patience (and self control with eating that chocolate!) to do that?

So Naïve owner and chocolate maker Domantas Uzpalis has given us this experience in one single chocolate package. And I think this is a fantastic idea.


So how did this Mexico-origin chocolate taste anyway?
Both chocolates had that citrus tang that my own Mexico origin chocolate has, and that wonderful milky colour (even though it was dark chocolate with no milk in it) of Mexican white Criollo cacao mixed in. The flavours, however, were sweeter and calmer, with perhaps some more conching* to calm them down, or the specific farm and fermentation methods applied created a sweet and more delicate profile. Certainly terrior played a role, since the Finca la Rioja plantation chocolate did not contain all the hazelnut notes and leather that my chocolate and Goodnow Farms chocolate (both from the Tobasco region of Mexico) contain.

The package offered a wonderful tasting chart inserted inside it. Overall, the tasting notes really hit the nail on the head. Hay, cream and citrus were common flavour notes in each bar, however Harvest #1 offered more citric acid and coffee flavours, whereas Harvest #2 offered roiboos flavour notes. I found #2 to be much sweeter than #1, and low and behold, there were also some charts below the flavour notes that I had not noticed until I sat down to write this post, showing that Naive also found less bitterness in #2.

I loved all the charts and notes put into this package.  Although it is trendy to place NO flavour notes on packaging these days, there are some bars where extra information is welcome, especially in such an innovative package as this. It truly offers the taster an amazing learning opportunity. The only downside was that the harvest dates were not printed or indicated on the package anywhere, nor was the % of cacao in the chocolate. It was about a 70% dark chocolate, although could have fallen just below perhaps to a 67% or up to a 72% dark chocolate (this is my best tasting guess :-) ).

Should you buy this chocolate?
I encourage you to try this chocolate, if you can get your hands on it. Be warned: this is a Naive 'Nano Lot', which means it may be made just once and then never offered again. However, I hope this post will hint to Naïve to create more Nano Lots of chocolate just like this one, making two bars of chocolate from different harvests in one package.

I bought this at www.chocolateproject.ca/. You can also find out more about Naïve on the chocolate maker's webste at: www.chocolatenaive.com

*conching refers to a process of heating, aerating, and cooling the chocolate while it is in constant motion over a period of time (sometimes up to 72 hours). This was invented by Rudolph Lindt...a long time ago.