There is a farm in the Soconusco region of Chiapas called La Rioja.

It does not produce much. The trees are old and they are few — scattered across a small orchard that a man named José María Pascacio tends the way his great-grandfather Don Moisés tended it before him. Four generations of the same family, the same trees, the same variety of cacao that most of the world has either forgotten or never knew existed.

The variety is called Criollo. It is the oldest cultivated cacao in Mexico, perhaps in the world — grown here since before anyone thought to write such things down. Modern agriculture largely bypassed it. Criollo is fragile where other varieties are hardy, low-yielding where they are prolific, difficult where they are obliging. It survived not because it was convenient but because a small number of people found it worth preserving.

The beans are white inside.

Not ivory. Not pale brown. White — a genetic condition so unusual that it stops most people who encounter it for the first time. The absence of anthocyanins, the pigments that darken nearly every other cacao variety on earth, gives Criollo its pallor and, incidentally, its character. No anthocyanins means no tannins. No tannins means no bitterness. What remains is something else entirely — a cacao so gentle and so complex that a Valencian named Víctor Feliu, who had been searching Mexican farms since 2014 for exactly this kind of bean, knew within moments of tasting it that he had found what he came for.

The chocolate this produces does not look like chocolate should look. A 73% dark bar — by every convention a serious, austere thing — arrives the colour of milky tea. Pale ocher. The kind of colour that makes people ask whether something has gone wrong.

Nothing has gone wrong.

What follows on the palate is the point. Honey and grapefruit first, then something quieter — walnut, pistachio, a faint trace of ginger at the finish. Creamy where you expect intensity. Smooth where you expect edge. The absence of bitterness is not a weakness; it is the entire argument of the bar. This is what cacao tastes like when centuries of selective cultivation strip away everything harsh and leave only what is worth keeping.

Feliu makes this bar in Guadalajara from three ingredients: cacao, cane sugar, cacao butter. The recipe does not need to be more complicated than that. The farm is the complexity. The family is the complexity. The four generations of quiet, unglamorous custodianship that kept these trees alive when everything around them was being replaced with something easier to grow.

There are not many bars of this left. The farm is small and the harvest is what it is.

— Dima

"Feliu appears fourteen times in our 100 Best Mexican Chocolates ranking — more than any other maker."

Feliu Chocolate — Criollo Rioja 73% Origin: Finca La Rioja, Soconusco, Chiapas, Mexico Cacao variety: Criollo (white bean) Three ingredients: cacao, cane sugar, cacao butter

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