Weekend trip part two: Vinces

I woke up early on Saturday to take a bus to Vinces, about 2.5 hours north of Guayaquil in the province of Los Ríos (Guayaquil is in the province of Guayas).

You can see that Guayaquil is a port city, Vinces is North in the Los Rios province (just NW of Babahoyo, written in big letters, the capital of Los Rios)

Photo of the "Torre Eiffel" in Vinces. Found on the internet, not mine.

Vinces is known as "little Paris"- during the cocoa boom (late 19th-early 20th centuries), many rich Ecuadorian plantation owners frequently travelled to Paris and brought back customs, fashions, and even chose to send their children to Paris to be educated. Now, there aren't many French remnants left, but there are some wooden Municipal buildings built with a French style. There is also...a mini Eiffel Tower! I was joking with some new friends about how Vinces is known as the Paris Chiquito, but I learned while I was in Vinces- there actually is a tower! It's about 7 meters high.

I "was invited" (read: forcibly invited myself) to a meeting with cocoa producers in Vinces and an Italian client who specializes in direct trade cocoa products. "We" (the Asociación de Productores Orgánicos de Vinces (APOV)- and the sneaky gringa) met with Gianluca Franzoni, an Italian chocolatier, and also a famous restaurant critic and general "taster"- he tastes wine, cocoa, coffee, honey, and many other items. He's apparently a big deal in Italy- I had no idea! But I Google'd him back in Quito today, and he even has several entries under Google Images. Anyone who has several pictures of themselves featured prominently under Google Images is a Big Deal in my book.

Cocoa at the APOV co-op

Fermentation boxes- Nacional cocoa usually ferments for about 3 days

Some cocoa pods sitting around outside of the co-op

Cocoa drying on the outside patio, after the fermentation process

Me trying some of Wilson's cacao en baba in Búa, near Santo Domingo in 2008

APOV's buying system is fairly unique. They buy cocoa from the farmers en baba- covered in the pulpy liquid that surrounds the beans inside the cocoa pod. This means that all of the cacao that the co-op buys is fermented and dried evenly. Most co-ops buy dry beans, but you have to depend on farmers knowing how to properly ferment their beans, and they do it uniformly- something that's hard to do. Becuase cocoa en baba weighs much more because of the liquid that eventually drips and dries off, I learned that the co-op pays each farmer for 38 kilos of dry beans for every 100 kilos of beans en baba that they bring in. This in itself is complicated- farmers don't do the complex math to figure out how much their beans weigh en baba compared to when they're dry, so they're often suspicious of this system, although I was assured that farmers don't get ripped off this way.

Young cocoa plants at the greenhouse

L-R: Gianluca, Gerardo, Jaime in front of Jaime's Nacional cocoa tree. The green pods mean they're not ripe yet

Gerardo standing in front of a tree that needs pruning that is no longer productive

So, there was a meeting between the Comercialization Manger Gerardo, President Julio, Associated Agricultural Engineer Lupita, Italiano Famoso Gianluca, and Intrusive Gringa Michelle. When the meeting finished, we all took a trip to see APOV's greenhouse where they're growing new cocoa plants to hand out to APOV farmers. We also visited one farmer's particularly productive finca, or plot of land. The tiny part of his finca that we saw had mostly cocoa and banana trees, and it had been recently pruned, something that most farmers don't do, either out of ignorance or out of laziness. Pruning can help a tree remain productive for a long time, and can help to keep common diseases and plagues out of the finca.

Rodeo!

I wouldn't mind relaxing here after harvesting my cocoa...(of course no small-scale cocoa producer can afford it)

We stopped by a local Hotel/Spa- El Señor de los Caballos- a lodge with a rodeo (we watched some unimpressive rodeo-ing), a pool, and relaxing hotel rooms. Back in Vinces (the finca and lodge were about 20 minutes by truck outside of Vinces in neighboring communities) we ate what surely must have been a disappointing lunch for someone with such a trained palate as Gianluca. After stopping off at another finca, they offered to take Gianluca back to Guayaquil, and I stowed away in the truck as well.

This finca has Nacional, or aromatic, fine quality cocoa

This finca has CCN-51 cacao, known as a "clone" that has less flavor. More for bulk. You can tell the difference because these trees tend to fork immediately from the trunk, whereas Nacional more commonly has one solid trunk

L-R: Gerardo, me and Gianluca in front of a 200 year cocoa tree!

Cocoa pods left to decompose in the finca

The visit was all about Gianluca- the APOV Comercialization Manager is hoping that when other European producers try the chocolate that he makes out of their cocoa, they'll score some new contracts. Gianluca also negotiates all of his business through direct trade- he doesn't deal with intermediaries or even national exporters. For being a Hot Shot, he was incredibly nice, laid back, and not at all weirded out by the gringa who invited herself along for the ride. He also had a delightful Italian lilt to his well-spoken Spanish. On top of that, he invited all of us (me and two men from APOV) out to a super posh dinner in Guayaquil. We went out to an Asian-Cuban fusion restaurant, apparently it's a chain and a big deal in NY. The food was yummy, the decor was hip, and the appetizers, two bottles of wine, main dishes and desserts that he treated us all to were very generous of him. It never escaped me that he definitely didn't have to include me in the dinner (even though I'd spent the day with the group) because he's clearly just negotiating with APOV, and paying for my meal wasn't at all necessary. So Gianluca earned major kudos with me for being an all around nice guy.