Bem-Vindo (Welcome) to Vinte Vinte

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Chocolate Tourism for the Curious

With a bit of lateral thinking, many people can work out that the biggest tourist money spinners in California are theme parks (Disneyland, etc.). Figuring out California’s next biggest tourist money spinner is trickier, but it’s sort of similar; it’s wine tourism in Napa and Sonoma. And this wine tourism has hugely helped promote passion for Californian wine all over the world.

For whatever reason, most European wine makers haven’t really jumped on this opportunity.

…Until now.

In July 2020 Porto, Portugal’s Northern capital, launched the wonderfully named ‘WOW’ (World of Wine), the brain child of Adrian Bridges, CEO of Taylor’s Port.

Adrian saw the passion and enthusiasm created by California winemakers with their visitor centres, train tours, etc. And he also realised that this sort of immersive experience could provide a unique angle to differentiate Porto. Porto has amazing restaurants, hotels and architecture. But unlike the Portuguese capital city of Lisbon, Porto didn’t have the likes of Lisbon’s Gulbenkian or Berardo Art Museum. But now it has WOW, which seeks to move beyond wine and establish “The New Cultural District”.

And WOW has moved from being “just” about port and wine. There is also a fashion museum, a cork museum, and frequent photography exhibitions.

Plus, for anyone interested, and especially anyone passionate about craft chocolate, in July 2020 WOW also opened a chocolate museum (called “The Chocolate Story”) and Pedro Araujo and Adrian Bridge also launched Vinte Vinte, a new craft chocolate maker a few months later in November. Just as the wine museum in WOW seeks to demystify and contextualise wine by showcasing all Portuguese wines and wine regions, the Chocolate Story at WOW graphically contextualises chocolate’s 5000 year old history and provides immersive, hands on activities to demystify how cocoa beans are transformed into chocolate bars.

This sort of experience is super important for craft chocolate. When you visit a specialty coffee shop, the barrista can not only explain the importance of their beans but they’ll also personally display their mastery to “pour over” a filter coffee, “pull” an espresso, perform “latte art”, etc. And consumers can ‘see’ the difference, and, almost by osmosis, learn the difference between mass produced, instant coffee and speciality coffee. It’s far harder to explain this for craft chocolate. Just looking at the packaging doesn’t easily reveal the huge difference between a mass produced bar where the “maker” buys in, and remoulds, industrial couverture as opposed to the approach of craft chocolate bars where makers work directly with farmers to seek out the best beans before crafting these to coax out flavour (come to our tastings to understand why we compare mass produced bars to chicken nuggets and craft chocolate to a home cooked roast chicken).

And whereas London alone has over 2000 speciality coffee stores, Europe overall has less than 20 makers where you can visit a craft chocolate maker to see them crafting their bars (for more details on these great pioneers, and maybe find one near you, please see our ‘chocolatourism’ section).

WOW’s Chocolate Story is even more than a visit to a craft chocolate maker. There are fourteen different “rooms” (or sections) to WOW’s Chocolate Story. The first sections deal with chocolate’s spread around the world, covering first the pre-Columbus Mesoamerican four thousand plus year history before explaining how chocolate spread in 17th and 18th century Europe, and then how mass marketing in the 20th century caused the dramatic rise of industrial, mass produced confectionery. There are also sections on Theobroma cacao as a plant, and its environmental importance. And then there are sections explaining how chocolate is crafted and made, with a clever series of images of hands to reinforce the manual nature of all steps of both industrial and craft chocolate on the farm and jungle. And of course visiting WOW’s Chocolate Story also gives you the chance to see the magical transformation from beans to bar achieved by Pedro and team, and in person hear more about the origins of their various bars.

Visiting Vinte Vinte, The Chocolate Story, and WOW is a great reason (if ever one was needed!) to visit Porto, one of Europe’s most magical cities. And while you are there, please do also consider a day trip to Aviero where you can visit Sue and Tomoko, founders of another Portuguese craft chocolate maker, Feitoria do Cacao (and great mates of Pedro’s), and see why Aviero is known as “Portugal’s Venice”.

If you want to find out more about Pedro and Vinte Vinte’s story, please check out our maker profile (and yes, their name, Vinte Vinte, or “Twenty Twenty” in English, is a reference to Theobroma cacao, the cocoa tree’s preference to grow within twenty degrees North and South of the equator. And no, there are no plans to change the name of Taylor’s, Fladgate’s, Croft’s, or any of Taylor’s other port brands to “Twenty Eighty Fifty Two”, the latitudes for wine grape growing!)