Port Guanaja, one of the Bay Islands in the Caribbean off the northern coast of present-day Honduras (& east of Belize), where August 15, 1502 Columbus first spotted something of value he described as “almonds” that were dropped in the belly of a large dugout canoe of the Chontal-Maya Putún who proceeded to scramble furiously to pick them up as if blindly searching for their lost contact lens. (The canoe a kind of floating Federal Reserve Bank back then, as noble cacáo was used as a sort of currency among Mayans – less for commodity commerce & more in a tribute system of statecraft - they nonetheless counted it the same as gold; hence the coinage ‘money grows on trees’; see pages 105-108 in Sophie Coe’s True History of Chocolate; & grew richer still controlling cacáo trade-routes up & down the coast.)

Though not the first (that honor probably belongs to Bonnat), Valrhona deserves principal credit for inaugurating the concept of Grand Cru in the 1980s with this bar which sent modern chocolate spiraling upward, popularizing the movement toward handcrafted chocolate that summoned appetites to take a new look. separating the real thing from sugar-froth candy bars. The cacáo equivalent of splitting the atom, that small step on the moon or, if you like, James Brown getting the recording industry spinning.

A joint blessing / curse, Valrhona selects up to a dozen varietals for this blend, as if from multiple sources & different ports, everything flows to Rio Cocoa before heading out to sea under a united flag of globalism. But with so many flavors onboard (a mutiny-cum-orgy) the motto reads ‘e unum pluribus’ – ‘from 1 into many’ - the new chocolate Babylon. Which pretty much heralds then sums up technique, specialization, & science on the long tortuous road of Western chocolate-making, of which this very website is but a consequence... be it for ill or hoped-for goodwill, we’re replicant creatures of this ur-blend - a bar that has enough layers to be its own geologic era to fit Samuel Goldwyn's take on a good story: starts with an earthquake & works its way up to a climax.

(* Historically this bar has impacted the shorter “lesser history” of chocolate; scant little is known prior to the Contact Period / late Mexìcâ-Aztec Empire, tracing back to the Mokaya in & around Xoconochco, circa 1800-1400 BCE, though this is changing with ongoing research by the likes of Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, Arturo Gómez-Pompa, & Cameron McNeil.)