On the way to Portugal’s Douro Valley to meet winemaker Pedro Pocas. Looking forward to walking through the old vines on his stunning estate set amongst the terraced slopes of this corner of northern Portugal. My travelling companions are Gabriela Pereira, one of our Product Developers and a native Portugese speaker, and my brother Simon who is our copywriter and coming along to record The Quest.

Our aim is to find the ultimate Tawny Port to partner after dinner chocolate tasting. If we succeed in finding the right port, we will have it bottled ready for launch in the winter.

Three years ago we bottled our first vintage of Chateau Chocolat, a complex red wine made from rare old vines and selected to partner our dark chocolate. We serve it in our Boucan restaurant and have it in most stores. It has grown quite a fan club and soon will be available by the case online. Time for a very special tawny port stable mate!

It must have been 1993 when we first started to think about making our first Easter egg. I called a few chocolate people to ask for advice. One of them was the UK’s, and possibly Europe’s, major egg spinner ‘What you want to do is make the shells as thin as possible and arrange all the stuff around the outside so the whole thing looks as big as possible’. Even then I found that a little distasteful and we decided to do the opposite – make the eggs ridiculously thick and fit all the stuff inside the egg. Fortunately our extra thick eggs caught on and we are still doing them 18 years later.

If only the talented engineers who have spent years perfecting the ultra thin egg (which you can sneeze through) had spent their time on something more useful to humanity. Turns out that the lead engineer was our very own Phil Buckley (Country Head of Saint Lucia) in the dark days before he became a convert to estate grown super premium chocolate!

We can reveal today some very exciting news – Hotel Chocolat has developed the world’s first milk chocolate cocoa beans by ‘watering’ our Rabot Estate cocoa trees with milk. This breakthrough means the beans can now be made directly into milk chocolate, without having to add milk to the recipe.

Chief Executive, Angus Thirlwell, said, “This is a much more efficient way to make milk chocolate and I’m delighted to reveal it to our customers first. There has only been one minor downside to date, but we think we may have overcome that problem already…”

Estates Director, Phil Buckley, who has been the driving force behind this huge step forward said, “It’s very quiet here in Saint Lucia during the off season, so we started experimenting to pass the time. Unfortunately, the rum-fed cocoa trees are looking a bit worse for wear, but the milk-fed trees have flourished.”

However, as already mentioned, there is a downside to watering cocoa trees with milk – the creamy aromas have attracted quite a number of cats to the estate.

Phil Buckley explains, “I’ve nothing against cats, but the mewing was driving us all mad. Luckily, it turns out our neighbour’s dogs are lactose intolerant, so they’re more than happy to chase the cats away. I’d like to say a big thank you to our neighbours up at the Poisson d’Avril Estate.”

More soon…