How does one enjoy a nearly $300 bar of chocolate? In the case of To’ak Chocolate, one pairs it with a really good glass of whiskey, cognac or rum, says co-founder Jerry Toth, who recommends a Pappy Van Winkle, Frapin XO or El Dorado 21 year as options.
一块售价将近300美元的巧克力应该怎么吃呢？对于传说中的To’ak巧克力来说，该公司联合创始人杰瑞·托特表示，应该搭配上好的威士忌、干邑白兰地或朗姆酒。他极力推荐的是派比·范温克威士忌、法拉宾XO、或剑鱼号21年特藏陈年朗姆酒。

The former Wall Street investment banker turned environmental conservationist-chocolatier had an unlikely career trajectory, but Toth says he’s putting his economics degree from Cornell to good use.
杰瑞·托特原本是一名华尔街投资银行家，后来转行成为一名巧克力大亨兼环保人士，这似乎是一条不可能出现的职业发展轨迹，不过托特本人却表示，他并没有白白浪费他在康奈尔大学(Cornell University)获得的经济学学位。

While working at rainforest conservation organization Toth found himself in the valley of Piedra de Plata in the Ecuadorian province of Manabí. He left Wall Street after realizing pretty quickly that wasn’t the lifestyle for him. He relocated to South America where he met a woman from Ecuador who would become his girlfriend and soon help him launch a rainforest conservation organization in her home country. “We developed a 1,000 acre forest preserve in coastal Ecuador and started working with nearby farmers to reforest their cattle pastures with shade-grown cacao trees,” says Toth.
托特此前在一个热带雨林保护组织工作时，曾经在厄瓜多尔马纳比省的普拉塔河谷待过一阵子。再往前追溯，托特还曾在华尔街奋斗过一段日子，不过很快他发现那不是自己喜欢的生活方式。于是他启程前往南美的厄瓜多尔，在那里遇到了他后来的女朋友，她帮助托特在厄瓜多尔成立了一个热带雨林保护组织。托特回忆道：“我们在厄瓜多尔沿海建立了1000英亩雨林保护区，然后与当地农民一道退耕还林，种植适合在荫地生长的可可树。”

Toth and his girlfriend also started growing cacao trees on their own experimental agroforestry plot, where they found groves of old cacao trees growing wild. “We started to harvest the fruit and ferment, dry and roast the beans and make our own chocolate, and immediately we recognized that this chocolate was in a different universe from anything else we had ever tasted that bore the name ‘chocolate,’” Toth says. “Only later did we find out that the cacao beans in this province of Ecuador have historically been considered the most prized variety in the world. It was like a wine maker one day waking up and someone telling him that he’s been living in the Côte d’Or, Burgundy his whole life.”
托特和他的女友也开始在自己的试验田里种植可可树，后来他们发现这里的老可可树长得很快。“我们开始收割可可豆，然后进行发酵、脱水、烘烤，生产自己的巧克力，很快我们意识到，这种巧克力与我们之前吃过的所谓‘巧克力’相比，完全就像来自另一个星球。后来我们才发现，这个省的可可豆历来被视为全世界最宝贵的品种。这就好像一个酿酒师一觉醒来，别人告诉他原来他这辈子一直住在勃艮第的金丘一样。”

When Toth and his friend Carl Schweizer set out to find the best cacao beans to create their chocolate bar, they paid particular attention to the soil and climate in which the beans were grown. The flavor characteristics of cacao vary by location—think of it as similar to the characteristics of the different grape varieties used to produce wine.
当托特和他的朋友卡尔·施威策开始寻找最适合制作巧克力的可可豆时，他们特地留意了这些可可豆生长的土壤和气候。可可豆的风味会随着种植地的不同而产生差异，就好像不同产地的葡萄会酿出不同口味的红酒一样。

What Toth didn’t know was that an outbreak of “Witch’s Broom” disease all but decimated the source of Ecuador’s national treasure: the heirloom cacao tree. Most of the trees currently growing in the country are hybrids, bred with foreign varieties of cacao. Only scattered remnants of heirloom cacao trees are left, and those are usually found in remote pockets of the country, with the most cherished among them residing in the famous Arriba cacao growing region.
不过托特当时并不知道，厄瓜多尔曾经爆发过一场名叫“丛枝病”的病害，将本地的原生可可树种摧毁殆尽。目前厄瓜多尔境内的大多数可可树，都是与外来树种杂交的。厄瓜多尔的原生树种只在少数地区零星散布，而且它们一般都位于该国的偏远地区，其中有些最珍贵的原生树种分布在该国最著名的阿锐巴可可树种植区。

Toth and Schweizer set out to find the ideal appellation, which turned their attention upriver, toward the watersheds of the Daule and Babahoyo Rivers. They enlisted the help of a local friend, ServioPachard, a fourth generation Manabi cacao grower. His great-grandfather was one of the first men to settle the hinterlands of Managi, and Pachard’s own explorations of the region as an agroforestry specialist provided him access to isolated valleys beyond the reach of roads
托特和施威策动身去寻找理想的产区，最终他们把将目光投向多勒河和巴巴奥约河流域。他们得到一位当地朋友的帮助，他叫塞尔维奥·帕查德，既是马纳比地区第四代可可树种植者，也是该地区的农业专家。帕查德经常在该地区进行探索，这种经历使他能够找到那些远离公路的偏僻山谷。

The expedition led them deep into the low-lying mountains where only a handful of Nacional Arriba cacao trees remained, some of which are more than 100 years of age. They found their source.
最终，他们深入到一片丘陵地带，那里还存活着极少数原生的阿锐巴可可树，其中有些树已经生长了100多年了。他们终于找到了自己需要的树种。

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Not all beans pass muster. “Our beans are subjected to six different phases of hand-selection—in each phase, we remove beans that are deemed too small, under-ripe or over-ripe or imperfectly fermented,” notes Toth. The final selection process took three days of inspecting the beans one-by-one and making value judgments on their suitability.
并不是所有的可可豆都符合要求。托特指出：“我们的可可豆要经过6道手工挑选程序，在每个阶段，我们都会挑出个头太小、不够成熟、过于成熟、或者发酵不够完美的豆子。”最后一道工序需要花费三天时间，他们要逐个检查每颗可可豆，对它们是否适合做巧克力进行评价。

Unused beans were returned to the forest floor and now serve as nutrition for the soil or were sold to producers of lower-grade chocolate products. “At production time this year, we actually produced over 900 bars, but roughly one-third of them were found to have blemishes on the surface, so they were separated from the rest and are being used for various tasting and aging experiments,” says Toth. The remaining 574 bars, deemed worthy for packaging, are the only bars we have released to the public.” The goal for 2015’s harvest is to produce just over double that amount, around 1,200, depending on a number of factors including climate.
弃置不用的可可豆会被拿回树林做肥料，或是卖给其他厂家做稍微低端的巧克力产品。托特表示：“在今年的生产期间，我们实际上生产了900多块巧克力，但我们发现其中三分之一表面上有瑕疵，所以我们会把这些挑出来，用做进行各种品尝或陈化试验。”剩下的574块巧克力才是值得包装的，也是最终投放市场的产品。托特的目标是2015年将产量提高一倍，达到1200块，但这也要取决于包括天气在内的一系列因素。

In addition to the 2015 Rain Harvest release, the team is currently aging a portion of its 2014 harvest. “We are not aging them as bars—rather, we are aging the chocolate mass prior to tempering and formation into bars,” adds Toth. “As with wine, slight and long-term access to oxygen (in a controlled temperature setting) helps soften the tannins of chocolate and rounds out the acidity. In 2015, we will also be releasing about 400 bars of 2014 One-Year Reserve.”
除了推出2015年的雨林巧克力(Rain Harvest)之外，这支团队目前还在陈化2014年的部分巧克力。托特补充道：“我们不是要把它们陈化成巧克力块，而是在调温和出模之前先将巧克力脂陈化。和酿酒一样，（在受控的温度设置下）少量地长期接触氧气，有助于软化巧克力中的丹宁并减少其中的酸。2015年，我们也将推出大约400块2014年的1年珍藏巧克力。”

Toth says what makes the beans prized and the chocolate so strong is its complexity and balance, and he thanks the growing region for that. “What I think is special, particularly with our chocolate—and this has a lot to do with terroir of Piedra de Plata—is the wealth of secondary flavor characteristics that evolve from one second to the next,” he says.
托特表示，这种可可豆和巧克力如此珍贵的原因在于它的复杂性和平衡度，这主要归功于它的产地。他表示：“我认为这种巧克力的特殊之处是，吃下去后还有丰富变化的后味，这与拉塔河谷的土壤有很大关系。”

The chocolate’s complexity is partly what makes it such a good candidate for pairings with high-end alcohol like cognac, whiskey and rum. Three, soon to be four, retail locations throughout the U.S. offer tastings.
这种巧克力的复杂性，使得它与威士忌、干邑白兰地或朗姆酒等高端酒非常相配。现在你可以在美国的三家零售店品尝这种巧克力，该公司很快还会增加一家零售店。

Cognac is the best spirit pairing, according to Toth, preferring Kelt XO and Frapin XO as top choices. “Rum is the other definite winner,” he adds. “El Dorado 21 year and El Dorado 15 year are top choices in the rum category.”
据托特称，干邑白兰地是最配这种巧克力的酒，而凯尔特XO和法拉宾XO更是绝配。他补充道：“朗姆酒绝对也是上上之选，剑鱼号21年和15年特藏陈年朗姆酒则是首选品牌。”

“If Cognac is the most divine, and rum quite nice, whiskey is the most complex,” he says. “Some whiskies are amazing, others are not. In the realm of Scotch, peaty whiskies, such as Ardbeg, Lagavulin, Bruichladdich do not work—the peatiness overwhelms the chocolate. Very oaky whiskies are also not great. The best Scotch whiskies are whiskies that are aged or finished in sherry casks or port-aged casks. Aberlour is arguably the best. Balvenie 15 year and 21 year (in port wood) is quite interesting.”
他还表示：“如果说干邑是天赐之配，朗姆酒也相当不错，那么威士忌则是最复杂的，有些威士忌搭配起来令人非常赞叹，有些则不行。在苏格兰威士忌里，阿德贝格、拉加维林和布鲁莱迪等泥炭威士忌都不行，橡木威士忌也不是很好。最好的苏格兰威士忌是雪莉桶或波特酒桶里窑藏的威士忌。亚伯乐威士忌大概是最好的。百富15年和21年（在波特酒桶里珍藏）就很不错。”

The best pairing of all, says Toth, is the Pappy Van Winkle. “Not only because of the name, but really, the nuances of both Pappy and of To’ak somehow manage to stand on equal ground,” he explains. “A mouthful of Pappy Van Winkle and To’ak Chocolate is an experience that is worth having, even if only once.”
托特表示，最绝妙的搭配就是派比•范温克威士忌。他解释道：“这不仅仅因为这款酒享有的大名，还因为派比•范温克威士忌和To’ak巧克力的细微之处难分伯仲。品一口派比•范温克，尝一口To’ak巧克力，这种感觉绝对值得拥有，哪怕只有一次。”

To’ak Chocolates and pairing are available in Chicago (both Lush Wine & Spirits retail locations), Los Angeles (Wally’s Wine & Spirits), and in the San Francisco Bay Area (Beltramo’s Wine & Spirits in Menlo Park). Individual bars can be purchased on the To’ak website. Each 50 gram bar comes packaged in a wooden box and accompanied by a 116-page booklet that includes an extensive guide to dark chocolate tasting, so not all of your $260 will go down your gullet.
To’ak巧克力和与之搭配的酒品目前在芝加哥、洛杉矶和旧金山湾区有售。该公司官网也在销售成品巧克力。每块50克的巧克力都会搭配一款木盒，以及一本厚达116页的黑巧克力品鉴指南，也就是说，你并不能把这260美元都吃下肚子。