Some chocolate, like wine and scotch, has pedigree

Saturday, February 14, 2004 Posted: 1521 GMT (11:21 PM HKT)

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) -- If you're looking for a Valentine's Day gift to tempt someone's taste buds, choose Venezuelan "single bean origin" chocolates, renowned among international gourmets for aroma and purity.

Just like exclusive wines and single-malt whiskeys, chocolate, made from cocoa or cacao beans, has its distinctive pedigrees and Venezuela has been a pioneer in promoting them.

"People know that Venezuela is the source of the finest (cacao) beans in the world, there's no disputing that," said Maricel Presilla, a food historian and chocolate expert in the United States.

Chocolates El Rey, a family firm founded in 1929, has carved out a niche for Venezuelan "single bean" chocolates in the fiercely competitive world market, where giants like Hershey and Nestle compete to conquer supermarket shelves.

"This is like the 'appellation controlee' of cacao," said Jorge Redmond, president of El Rey, the country's leading chocolate produce, referring to the French term that guarantees the exclusive origin of a fine wine.

"We've been working very hard to establish these designated origins," he added.

While most big manufacturers blend their chocolate using cacao from a variety of national origins -- West Africa, Ecuador, Brazil or Indonesia -- El Rey has made a point of using Venezuelan beans from specific growing areas and farms.

El Rey's products, which are exported to the United States, Europe and Japan, include its flagship Carenero Superior range produced from beans grown on the coast east of Caracas. It was a traditional cacao growing zone in Spanish colonial times.

The Carenero Superior line includes six types of chocolate, from white ranging up to a dark variety containing 73.5 percent cacao, for those who like their chocolate bitter-sweet.

Another "single bean" range, called Rio Caribe, is grown on the lush Paria Peninsula in eastern Venezuela where Christopher Columbus first landed on the American continent itself.

Chocolate revolution

Venezuela was once the world's biggest cacao producer -- wealthy individuals are still mockingly dubbed "gran cacaos" (Big Cocoas) -- but it has slipped far down in the producers' ranking as its oil boom displaced such traditional exports.

Presilla described El Rey's launch of the Carenero "single bean" line in the mid-1990s as "the keystone of a chocolate revolution."

"It put the name of Venezuela on the world map," she said.

Competitors of El Rey, such as France's Valrhona, have also moved to develop single origin and even single plantation chocolates, from Venezuela and other exotic venues.