SWEET SUCCESS
BELMONT ESTATE
Jason George takes a cocoa pod and smashes it open against the wall. “Here, try,” he says. I take one of the pulp-covered beans from within and it breaks into bitter fragments in my mouth. “I know it doesn’t look like it,” says Jason, encouragingly, “but this is how chocolate starts.”
Jason is a guide at Belmont, a historic estate on the island’s northeastern slopes. It can trace its roots back to the 1600s, when plantations were established during the time of French rule. Throughout its complex and, admittedly, not always glorious history, all manner of crops have been grown here, from coffee to cotton. But these days the estate focuses on cocoa — mostly the prized criollo and trinitario varieties — and nutmeg, Grenada’s signature spice.
But rather than planting crops uniformly, Belmont scatters its cocoa trees among other plants, such as fruit trees and vanilla orchids. Jason explains this approach as he ushers me under the boughs of a cocoa tree. “We’ve found that growing cocoa trees alongside other plants can really change the flavour of the chocolate. It makes the cocoa more interesting.” He gestures to the pale fruits of a nutmeg tree dangling just a few
