Pierre Marcolini’s two decades in the chocolate industry have been an odyssey. In that time, he has become one of the world’s best chocolatiers, collaborated with Tom Ford, Tom Dixon, and Saint Laurent, and become an exemplar of what it means to source cocoa ethically.
Marcolini founded his eponymous maison in 1995, but it was only in 2001 that he started producing the chocolate for his creations. Now, celebrating 20 years of chocolate making, he is launching 20 new chocolate tablets on September 3rd made with cocoa sourced from around the world.
Marcolini was one of the first chocolatiers to source his own cocoa directly from plantation owners – a process he calls ‘Bean to Bar’ – and it has become the defining element of his success.
‘When we started the Bean to Bar project 20 years ago,’ he says, the idea of a company sourcing its own beans to make chocolate for its products, rather than buying in chocolate ready made, was somewhat advanced. Now, he adds, ‘we’re hugely proud to launch a new collection of Grand Cru tablets’.
Grand Cru refers to the brand’s most exclusive chocolate, all of which is labelled according to the origin of its cocoa. ‘China, India, Indonesia,’ says the chocolatier. ‘I wanted to take lovers of fine chocolate on a journey and allow them to discover a diversity of flavours and textures. At times fruity, sometimes aromatic and at others tangy with woody undertones.’
For Marcolini, appreciating fine chocolate is like appreciating fine wine. Each bean has a unique intensity on the palate and depth of aroma based on where it comes from and how it was grown. For instance, the beans sourced from India are slightly tangy with nutty aromas, while the ones that come from Indonesia have notes of nutmeg and sumac.
This is part of the pleasure of Pierre Marcolini chocolates. Not only does the chocolate taste exceptional, but it encourages a more considered type of consumption. These are not chocolates you chow down half way through a stressful day at work, but rather ones that you savour, with each box offering its own array of surprises.
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