Every bar comes from one valley and one varietal — the pale, fragile Criollo cacao our family has grown on the same slopes for three generations. We ferment, dry and conche it ourselves, so what you taste is the year, the rain and the soil, undisguised.
What a single estate makes possible
Industrial chocolate is engineered for sameness across millions of bars. Our process is built for the opposite — to carry one estate's character, one harvest at a time. These are six of the eleven, the ones that decide whether a year survives or gets flattened.
Pods are cut at full ripeness and opened the same day. Criollo's pale, almost ivory beans are too delicate to gather any other way — a machine would split them, and the day's flavour with them. We pick only what we can ferment that evening.
Six days in cedar boxes, turned by hand at dawn and dusk, the pulp doing the slow work that builds a bar's aroma long before any heat touches it.
Two weeks on stone patios, raked by hand, never forced with kiln heat. The bean loses water on the valley's own clock, not a factory's.
A low, slow roast that coaxes the florals forward and leaves the fruit intact. Push the heat for speed and you trade jasmine for ash — so we don't.
Cracked and the husk drawn off in a single draught of air, so only the heart of the bean — and none of the bitterness in its skin — reaches the stone.
Granite wheels turn nib and a little cane sugar for three days until the texture turns to silk — then the chocolate rests for weeks before it earns a wrapper.
One valley, read across the seasons. Each vintage is made from a single harvest off Hacienda Santa Lucía and tasted blind by the family before it ships. We write the notes the way they land on the tongue — not the way a label would dress them up.
Our signature bar in a bright, wet-season year. Jasmine on the nose, then ripe apricot and a long caramel finish. The clearest argument we know that fine cacao is barely bitter at all.
From the oldest trees on the highest slope, in a dry year. Honey, toasted almond, and a whisper of orange peel. Deeper and rounder than the valley floor — altitude you can taste.
The river-bottom trees, where the soil holds water. Red plum, fresh fig, and a tang like good wine. Lower in cacao, higher in fruit — the bar sceptics fall for first.
A standout harvest we held back to age. Three years on, it has softened into dried cherry, brown butter, and tobacco. Sold by the numbered bar, until the lot is gone.
Milk chocolate with nothing to hide behind. Estate Criollo, jersey milk powder, and cane sugar, conched until it tastes of dulce de leche and warm hazelnut — no vanilla, no shortcuts.
Our Santa Lucía bar, finished with hand-harvested salt from the Paria coast. The flake lands, the caramel answers, and the square disappears faster than you meant it to.
Poured at, written up in, and stocked by
"Sustainable" is the most overworked word in food. We'd rather show what it looks like on our own land — because when one family farms, ferments and sells the same beans, there's no one else to blame and nowhere to hide.
Our Criollo grows beneath native canopy alongside banana, cedar and citrus — the way cacao evolved. No forest is felled to plant a bar.
We propagate from our own oldest trees to preserve a varietal the commodity market spent a century breeding out of existence.
The people who pick and ferment are paid a living estate wage, year-round — not a seasonal piece rate set by a distant exchange.
Pod husk returns to the soil as compost; the fruit pulp becomes a cellar-door cacao tonic. The valley feeds itself back.
Criollo trees give a fraction of what bulk hybrids do. We plant for flavour and longevity, not tonnage — and price the bar to make that honest.
Mature shade trees and undisturbed soil hold more carbon than a cleared plantation ever could. The estate is a forest first, a farm second.
“I poured the 2024 Santa Lucía next to a Burgundy at a dinner and the chocolate held its own. It opened with flowers and finished on caramel — I genuinely forgot there was no fruit added to it. This is a vintage, not a sweet.”
“I've judged the cocoa awards for a decade and true Criollo this clean almost never crosses the table. To taste it from one estate, vintage-dated, with the bitterness gone entirely — that's the bar I send people to when they say they don't like dark chocolate.”
“The Cellar Club is the only parcel I rush to open. Two bars off the same hillside, a card on the harvest and the weather that made it, and a flavour I can never quite predict from one year to the next. It has quietly ended supermarket chocolate for our whole house.”
Every bar is 65 grams, wrapped and stamped with its block and harvest year. Shipped temperature-safe; complimentary delivery on orders over $60.
Taste one harvest, no commitment.
The estate's best work, first.
Numbered cases & corporate gifts.
Criollo is the original, aromatic cacao varietal — pale-beaned, low in bitterness, and famously hard to grow. It's well under one percent of the world's crop because the industry replaced it with hardy, high-yield bulk cacao. We farm only Criollo, which is why our bars taste of flowers and fruit rather than the ash most people expect from dark chocolate.
It means every bean comes from one valley we own and farm — often one block of trees — and one harvest. We control fermentation, drying and making end to end, so nothing is averaged across countries or lots. That's why our river-bottom bar tastes of plum and our high-slope bar of honey. Blended commodity chocolate erases exactly that difference; we build the whole estate around keeping it.
Because a single estate tastes different every season, the way a vineyard does. A wet year leans red and fruity; a dry one turns to honey and nuts. We keep each harvest separate and date it so you can taste a place across time — and, if you like, drink a vertical flight of the same block across several years.
Bitterness usually means careless beans or a hard roast. With true Criollo, well fermented and lightly roasted, even our 80% Reserva tastes of dried cherry and brown butter, not char. Start at 70% and climb — most people are surprised how high they happily go.
Cool, dark and far from the fridge — cacao hates humidity and absorbs nearby smells. Sealed, our bars hold their best flavour for about a year, and the aged Reserva will keep evolving for longer. Let a square come to room temperature before you taste it; cold mutes the aromatics we work so hard to keep.
We host harvest-season tastings at the hacienda and keep a standing table at Salon du Chocolat each autumn. Walk the shaded rows, watch a ferment turned by hand, and taste straight off the stone before a single bar is wrapped. Dates open to Cellar Club members first.
Choose a single vintage, or let the Cellar Club bring two bars off the hillside to your door each month. One honest square, and blended chocolate never tastes quite the same again.