A Chocolate Tour of the Caribbean

Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

Clockwise from top left: Three scenes from Hotel Chocolat, Fond Doux Estate, Delft Cocoa Estate, St. Lucia. Center: creation by Isabel Brash at Cocobel Chocolate. More Photos »

ONE morning on St. Lucia, as I was waking from beatific dreams, I discovered that I had turned into a luscious, ripe cocoa pod.

Or so I imagined, borrowing freely from Kafka's opening line in "Metamorphosis." For three decadent days, I had been eating chocolate-stuffed liver pâté, cocoa-encrusted kingfish and, for breakfast, cocoa-and-cashew granola. At night I drank cocoa Bellinis. I indulged in a cocoa oil massage, hiked through cocoa fields and created my own chocolate bar. Dawn consistently carried the pungent aroma of cocoa trees, because I was staying on a verdant cocoa estate — and sleeping in a cocoa pod.

Well, sort of: Hotel Chocolat, a boutique property in St. Lucia, features not rooms but "luxe pods," where even the magnificently minimalist décor (rich mahogany floors, ivory-colored bathroom with open-air shower) evokes the essence of chocolate.

Hotel Chocolat's union of tourism and agricultural development, specifically its devotion to all things cocoa, is part of a budding movement across the Caribbean. You might call it choco-tourism.

From Tobago to Dominica, Grenada to St. Vincent, the Caribbean cocoa industry, which has roots in colonial times, is being revitalized. This is excellent news economically: With free trade having all but destroyed the islands' banana and sugar industries, fair-trade farming initiatives are a welcome boon.

And it's hardly small-change news; the world price of cocoa nearly doubled from 2004 to 2008, with an even greater increase for the rare genre of bean the Caribbean is feted for: fine-flavored cocoa, which makes up just 5 percent of the global market. What grows in the Caribbean is the Champagne of cocoa. It even has its own promotional team: the two-year-old Caribbean Fine Cocoa Forum, a European Union-financed networking vehicle working to bolster production and exports in nine countries.

And then there is the tourism connection. Aficionados flock to Napa or the Loire Valley for wine tasting; why not go to stunning island locales to indulge in sun, sand, sea — and chocolate?

There is already, after all, a chocolate-themed Caribbean holiday offered by Silversea Cruises. In Belize, the annual Toledo Cacao Festival celebrates the cocoa-driven culture of the Mayan, Garifuna, East Indian and Creole people from the Toledo district. In Dominica, visitors can stay in the boutique Cocoa Cottage hotel; they can tour the Agapey Chocolate Factory in Barbados. The Grenada Chocolate Company pioneered the trend in 1999, offering tours of its factory, farm and Bon Bon Shop in the island's rain forest.

Earlier this year I followed the cocoa trail across four islands and three languages. Not only did it forever spoil Hershey's for me, my tour also proved to be an eye-opening journey through settings both rustic and grand. It carried me beyond umbrella-studded beaches to far-flung fields, untouched island landscapes and a local culture with a legacy well worth witnessing.

I began in Trinidad, where the cocoa industry is such a mainstay that the University of the West Indies there has a Cocoa Research Center. The journey began in a very un-eco setting: the glinting Hyatt Regency in Port of Spain, a bustling Caribbean capital with some of the region's liveliest night life. I checked in, watched the sun set over the infinity pool, ate delectably fresh sushi at the sleek lobby bar and took in a few hours of soca at cavernous Club Zen.

The next morning I landed in another world. "Welcome to Gran Couva — Home of Fine Flavor Cocoa," read the humble sign for one of the world's most feted cocoa fields, in the Montserrat Hills region of central Trinidad. I had driven 15 minutes from the sprawl of Port of Spain before green erupted everywhere: rolling hills, quaint plant shops, iguanas scurrying across the road.

Pulling into a driveway, past a green gate, I was greeted by a host of butterflies, thundering squawks from a caged macaw and the outstretched hand of Lesley-Ann Jurawan, owner of Violetta Fine Chocolates and Delft Cocoa Estate in Gran Couva. She wore a shirt marked "Montserrat Cocoa Farmers Co-op" and explained that the co-op, to which Delft belongs, exports some of its beans to the Valrhona company in France, whose Gran Couva bar pays homage to the region. Most Caribbean-sourced chocolate (with the exception of the Grenada Chocolate Company and most of the artisanal small-batch chocolates I tasted during my tour) is produced in European cities, where the climate is more amenable to chocolate making.

"We have a long history, and we piggyback on it," Ms. Jurawan said. That history goes back to the 1830s. White colonials, East Indians, French Caribbean émigrés and Venezuelan peons fleeing federalist wars all settled in Gran Couva and the north of the island to cultivate cocoa. They bred their own bean, the trinitario: a hybrid that has become one of three main kinds of cocoa trees grown worldwide.

"Voilà," Ms. Jurawan said, handing me a shiny, scarlet trinitario pod. It fuses the prized complex and fruit-flavored criollo bean with the hardy forastero, the bulk bean, mostly sourced from West Africa, that accounts for some 70 percent of the chocolate we eat.

BAZ DREISINGER is a journalist and associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who writes about Caribbean culture.

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