When I came into my tasting room the following day the air was heavy with the wine’s sultry scent. I shared the leftover tasting wine with some friends and didn’t bother to replace the cork on the small amount left in the bottle.
Pull the cork on a Vinoptima 2007 Noble Gewürztraminer and you’ll discover a sort of wine essence that continues to deliver wave upon wave of exotic flavours long after it is opened. Some producers are even selling it with bitterness intact, giving all who love chocolate something to look forward to: new forms, new uses, new tastes, all continually inspired by its divine origins.Since the Romans and ancient Greeks started making and writing about wine the greatest wines have always been sweet.
It’s interesting to note that producers of chocolate are experimenting even further, by adding not just sugar and milk but chilli, lavender, mint, and other flavours. Thus, chocolate as we know and love came into existence after several thousand years of being consumed in liquid form with a pungent, bitter taste. While the addition of chilli had long since been dropped from the recipes by Europeans, vanilla was often retained, along with milk and sugar, the latter being unavailable to the Aztecs.
#NECTAR OF THE GODS HOW TO#
Not only did chemist Coenraad Johannes van Houten of the Netherlands create the process of manufacturing cocoa butter, but he also discovered how to treat chocolate with alkalis to remove the bitter taste that had until that point been characteristic of chocolate. It was not until 1828 when chocolate changed from a sacred drink to a solid bar we know today, through the addition of cocoa butter. And European royalty enjoyed the beverage as Aztec royalty had before them. Whilst electing a new Pope, the College of Cardinals meeting in Concalve used to sip the beverage. The ceremonial aspect of the drink was, in some convoluted way, preserved when it entered into the Catholic Church. In Europe-during the time of the novel, and even before-the price of chocolate was a luxury because it had to be brought across the Atlantic ocean before it could be consumed. In A Tale of Two Cities Dicken’s shows the transitional period of chocolate, between Mesoamerican luxury to the European commoners’ pleasure, when he explains with great detail Monseigneur’s elaborate consumption of chocolate in his Paris hotel room. The fact is opulent enough, but it was reported that for him to drink more than twenty-five glasses per diem was not uncommon.Ĭhocolate was again the drink the of elite, the delight of the plebeians, the bitterest of potables, the most saccharine of sweets, the iconic symbol of Mesoamerica. The origin of chocolate, according to Aztec legend, states that Quetzalcoatl brought the plant to Earth from heaven, not unlike Promentheus bringing fire to man, after man and woman, in a sacred garden not unlike Eden, attempted to steal the knowledge and power of the gods.īecause Quetzalcoatl considered their banishment from the garden too harsh a punishment, he gifted them chocolate.Ĭarl Linnaeus, founder of the modern classification system of all living things (taxonomy), clearly had this legend in mind when he named the plant Theobroma cacao, meaning ‘food of the gods’.Īs is so often the case with something reported to have come from the gods, royalty was interested in its consumption.Īztec king Montezuma was reported to have drank the beverage from golden goblets that were only holy enough for chocolate to be used once. Yet emerging linguistic evidence suggests that the Olmec, a Central American civilization that predates the Aztec and the Maya before them, were not unaccustomed to the plant and its possibility for creating a beverage. Coe of Yale University writes in his book, The True History of Chocolate that the first tangible evidence of chocolate consumption originates in mid-fifth century CE. Given my enjoyment, I was surprised to learn that chocolate’s current form is far removed from its origins as a drink of the gods, a nectar in the literal sense, of the Aztecs called xoxocatl.Īward-winning professor Michael D. I, for one, enjoy my chocolate mixed with nuts or berries, and I’m more partial to dark than milk, but I can’t recall ever refusing chocolate. Everyone has a specific craving, whether it be pure, refined, mixed, primed, or blended, but we all have experiences of one kind or another with the stuff.
It’s always in the back of one’s mind, or in the front of one’s mind when obtaining some becomes more acute.
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