Just how 'wild' are these beans? That they hail from tall trees bearing baby-sized pods with tiny seeds grown on islands in the middle of a seemingly endless savannah is a good sign. Multi-trunked trees also indicate some antiquity. Those come about when the mother tree dies & young shoots bloom at differing successive years over the course of the tree’s life & clump together.

Volker Lehmann of Rainforest Exquisite Products, who oversees the wild harvest of these trees as a broker to Felchlin, naturally vouches for their status. But games get played on the ground in the cacáo groves... with certification... & what Photoshop... plus a few extra dollars... can do for, say, 'organic' & 'FairTrade'.

Rio Bení cacáo, from where this Cru Sauvage hails, was thought to be planted by Jesuits, sourced from the Brazilian states of Rhondônia & Mato Grosso. The Jesuits eventually were expelled from the area & trees now found there that appear virgin forest would have been feral survivors of abandoned territory escaping domestication to return to the wild. But in 2010 conservation geneticist Dr. Dapeng Zhang conducted & completed genetic tests on Bolivian cacáo. His analysis substantiates that the lower one goes on the Rio Bení, the more indigenous & wild the cacáo. (Personal Communication)

Tales of both vast savannah & islands being man-made are rather exaggerated however. Natural seasonal flooding from the Madeira & Guaporé rivers forming the Bolivia / Brazil border primarily accounts for the wetlands. In the wake of such floods, ancient peoples may have then built irrigation systems to sustain them.

These cacáo "islands" (elevated bas relief, locally called chocolatal ['place where cacáo grows'], amid the swampland of Rio Bení) yield a 'savage' fruit hand-gathered by the ostensibly deepest of natives, the Cambas (by comparison those feared Yanomamö are supposedly tame, timid, & cosmopolitan [they're on TV car commercials after all]), which may just be a false rumor, considering their mixed European / indigenous ancestry, to keep gabacho predators away. Ya know, sort of how Iceland is really green & Greenland is really ice - oh, those tricky Vikings.

In sum, this bar presents a jungle paradox as rarefied as the Cambas themselves: wild & refined. And thereby preserve the fragile balance between man-made & natural.


Rio Bení, photo by Volker Lehmann