Not Just a World of Coffee: Connecting Coffee, Wine, and Cacao | 25, Issue 20
NOA BERGER explores how the “field” of coffee was inspired by (and inspires) related industries like fine wine, cacao, and—more recently—vanilla, and queries its impacts.
For me, love and appreciation of specialty coffee led, inevitably, to love and appreciation of other specialty delights. I discovered the world of single origin chocolate last year, and couldn’t resist setting up a comparative tasting, thinking, “What flavor notes exist in chocolate? Will I be able to tell the difference between these bars?” More recently, I went on a fascinating Internet deep dive into the word of cheese industry flavor wheels (though I still can’t tell you what a “catty” cheese tastes like). And it was another beloved café product—tea—that led me to a career in specialty coffee in the first place.
Taking a closer look, it’s clear that these industries often look to one another for inspiration—how to evaluate products, how to motivate consumers to buy specialty products, and how to operate more sustainably. Including these kinds of insights from other industries has long been a part of the SCA’s publications and event content. At Re:co in 2021, food scientist Alison Brown’s work on consumer perceptions of craft chocolate provided insight into how consumers use segmentation, price, availability, and packaging as quality determinants—and was subsequently referenced in the SCA’s White Paper proffering an attributes-based definition of specialty coffee. Anthropologist Sarah Besky’s discussion of tea’s sensory lexicon in Issue 19 of 25 reflects similar questions emerging for our industry now: who gets to define quality?
In this article, Noa Berger discusses ways in which specialty coffee has influenced other specialty industries, and how different domains can borrow from one another to create value. Noa also wisely points out that some systems and metaphors do not neatly “copy-paste.” Fine wine and coffee, for example, are not one and the same—the journeys of the products, as well as the lives and livelihoods of those who produce them, are dramatically different. Acknowledging these differences feels particularly important now, as the coffee industry explores new approaches for quality evaluation and value distribution, moving in some cases away from approaches that work well with wine but not with coffee.
For me, the sharing amongst specialty industries is a healthy reminder that we don’t—and shouldn’t—operate in a vacuum. By examining our relationships with other industries—and thinking critically about which practices translate well—we can build connections that help us innovate and secure a more sustainable future.
Chelsea Dubay
Curriculum Director, SCA
If you’ve made coffee your specialty, or a specialty, your world may have been enriched with knowledge from some of the many academic disciplines or from related industries.
Coffee chemists and botanists, coffee historians and sensory scientists, and coffee physicists and anthropologists are helping to shape the specialty coffee industry as a tiny universe where we can delve into different disciplines through coffee. This growing knowledge and science basis joins the rapidly growing tools for measuring different aspects of our coffee, for learning about its chemical, aromatic, and physical composition, and, of course—for making it.
These tools and resources contribute toward making coffee what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu named a “field” (champ, in French). Bourdieu described these fields as an entire universe with its own norms, positions (e.g., barista champion), incentives (e.g., the fame and brand ambassadorship opportunities gained by winning a competition), and specialized media, among other things.[1] A field becomes such when it has achieved a relative degree of independence from external constraints—in other words, it can set many of its own norms and values.
The field of specialty coffee consequently feels like its own self-contained universe, and it’s easy to become so immersed in this “world of coffee,” to get “caught up” in the micro details and the particles, that we sometimes forget that the field of coffee does not exist in a void—it has almost always existed as part of other, bigger fields that included other goods with whom it shared itineraries.
These encounters helped shape the coffee industry, the stories it tells, and the practices it uses. Coffee travelled together with spices from the port of Mokka across the Arabian Peninsula and into Europe, was served alongside alcohol as a medicine in 17th century European pharmacies,[2] and was used as a remedy for unbalanced humors along with tea.[3] As an increased interest in quality during the late 1960s gave rise to the specialty coffee movement, the initially North American movement was inspired by—and subsequently directly shaped by—a successful American quality revolution in another industry: fine wine.
From Fine Wine to Specialty Coffee
Specialty coffee was born at a sea change in the North America of the late 1960s. As William Roseberry suggested in his iconic article,[4] the United States had just transitioned from a Fordist, more industrialized production to a post-Fordist economy with new consumption “niches” emerging, providing goods that increasingly catered to consumers’ identities. Conspicuous consumption was not a novel phenomenon, but during the 1960s it became easier than ever for North Americans to access goods that had not just functional use but also the symbolic value of telling a story—about the goods themselves or the person buying them. A new market for “ethical” products had emerged, organic and fair, as well as a market for accessible luxuries, with a notable growth of the North American fine wine sector.
North American specialty coffee pioneers, seeking to tread the paths of the high-end culinary and fine wine industries, deliberately borrowed systems for the evaluation and description of wine to extract symbolic and consequently economic value.[5] Coffee professionals soon adopted the notion of “terroir,” the French term referring to the climate, soil, and processing conditions giving a good wine its unique flavor, or “taste of a place.” This term, very prominent in the wine industry, strengthened the notion that there was a strong correlation between the origin of the bean (or grape) and its quality. It further pushed for a higher-resolution understanding of “place”: it was not only the country that mattered, but also the region, the altitude, and later, even the lot (and, subsequently, the micro- and nano-lot). George Howell initially named a coffee brand “terroir coffee” and attempted to freeze coffee to create vintages;[6] Counter Culture Coffee wrapped their coffee in wine labels for a while.
Specialty coffee even borrowed the 100-point grading system, originally used by American wine critic Robert Parker, in the late 1990s. The first to use this in coffee were probably Kenneth Davids and Ron Walters, editors of the website Coffee Review, and it would later be adopted by the then-Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) when it developed its cupping form and protocol. The SCA(A) also launched the Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel in 1995, following the example of the Wine Aromas Wheel, created by Ann Noble in 1984 at University of California Davis (where the coffee flavor wheel was later reworked by the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) in 2017).[7]
Of course, the wine systems and metaphors don’t always neatly “copy-paste.” For example, using the same system to review coffee as is used to review wine may not have taken off because, unlike wine, coffee is “made” a few times (at the farm, in the roasting, and in the brewing).[8] Borrowing metaphors from the wine world also poses issues: wine is often produced in the same regions of the world where it is consumed, and the economic gaps between producers and consumers may not be as vast. As a result, the luxurious, rolling-hills type of imagery used in wine might take a different meaning for coffee.[9]
Wine continues to serve as an inspiration for the specialty coffee industry. Roasteries across the world now offer “grand cru” coffees, work in the allocation system (with producers reserving specific lots for a roaster), rename their baristas “cafeliers” (as did French roastery Le Café Alain Ducasse), age coffee in wine barrels, and apply a variety of fermentation techniques inspired by the wine world, like carbonic maceration or “methode Beaujolais,” a semi-carbonic maceration used for the fruity and light Beaujolais wines by French roastery Lomi in a collaboration with Brazilian farm Daterra. This is particularly visible in the French specialty coffee industry, which looked for ways to reference and dialogue with familiar traditions, like its prolific wine industry.[10]
From Specialty Coffee to Fine Cacao and Chocolate
Just as technologies, imagery, quality evaluation standards, and marketing strategies from the wine world were implemented in specialty coffee to shape that field, many in the fine cacao and chocolate industry have confirmed that they are now looking to specialty coffee for inspiration.
Dr. Carla Martin, the first cacao professional who introduced me to this idea, is a lecturer at Harvard University and Executive Director of the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute (FCCI), and in preparation for this feature, I wrote to ask her to explain more about this approach. In a collaborative response with her colleague from the FCCI José López Ganem, the organization’s Director of Innovation and a lecturer at Boston University, she explained the emerging relationship between specialty coffee and fine cacao. For Martin and Ganem, the mutual inspiration between chocolate and coffee is longstanding, thanks to the similarities in the geopolitical context in which these commodities are produced and traded: both emerged from “two overlapping longitudinal belts around the globe suitable for production in formerly colonized nations,” with “a large majority of consumption taking place in wealthy democracies of the so-called Global North.”
Wild cacao—Theobroma cacao—may have existed in Central America before human beings ever reached the continent, and it was there that it was probably domesticated, possibly by the Olmec who inhabited the Mexican Gulf Coast between 1500 and 400 BCE. The Mayans, who established their cities around 250, became the most associated with cacao in archeological and popular imagery. Mayan hieroglyphics suggest cacao was used for rites of passage including burials, weddings, and anniversaries. The Aztecs made chocolate into a portable and available commodity, and levied taxes and tributes through cacao. Spanish and Portuguese colonial powers exploited cacao’s economic and symbolic importance and soon incorporated it into their trade systems, enslaving and exploiting Indigenous populations across Central America and the Caribbean, in a manner that was similar to what these empires did with coffee. During the 20th century, chocolate and coffee became staples of consumer culture in the Global North, accruing great economic and symbolic value: coffee as the stimulating drink for intellectual thought and work, and chocolate as the stimulating sweet for consumerist romantic ideals, as a “guilty pleasure," and as a treat.
These historical similarities continue to this day, and result in a good deal of interchange. “For example,” explained Martin and Ganem, “in some regions of the world, producers grow both crops or are transitioning from one to the other, while employing their specialized knowledge.” The primary way in which coffee is being used as a guide for cacao production is, not surprisingly, at the farm level, with farmers applying agronomical technologies and techniques used for both crops. “Tropical crops are generally neglected by research,” adds Brigitte Laliberte, strategic advisor, Cacao of Excellence program. “During the colonial period—not to suggest in any way that they were positive—but advanced research was done on [tropical crops like cacao and coffee] and as this disappeared, the research focus has shifted. We are today planets away from crops like apples and pears. Cacao is particularly neglected. We’re missing basic research about urgent matters like climate change adaption.” Although coffee research may not be as advanced as is research on Global North crops, it is still more advanced than research conducted on and for cacao growers. Lessons learnt by coffee are being applied (and adapted) from coffee to cacao, two crops facing similar challenges.
The links between coffee and cacao continue from the farm to the actors that determine and mediate quality to end consumers. The specialty coffee sector draws a significant part of the legitimacy, value, norms, and practices from its organizations—and, according to Martin and Ganem, specialty chocolate took note: “the specialty chocolate industry routinely follows models from specialty coffee, e.g., with organizational efforts inspired by industry associations like the Specialty Coffee Association and competitions like Cup of Excellence.” Cacao of Excellence, “inspired by the coffee awards recognizing excellence,” was established in 2009, “exactly for the purpose of rewarding cacao producers, because in the cacao value chain there are a lot of rewards for chocolate makers, pastry chefs and so on, but nothing for the cacao producers,” explained Laliberte. This led the founders of the organization to realize that “there isn’t a common language about cacao quality and flavor as there is one in coffee. There’s a significant [number] of coffee cuppers around the world providing producers with an objective evaluation. That doesn’t exist at all in the cacao sector.” (Incidentally, as specialty coffee revisits its own evaluative tools, there is also a realization that the SCA’s 2004 cupping system isn’t objective, either, but “inter-subjective”—raising new questions around the impact of fields drawing from one another over time.)[11]
More visible links appear when considering how end products—coffee as a beverage and cacao in the form of chocolate—are marketed to consumers, particularly through the use of similar stories. Much like coffee, cacao draws on the mystery and romanticism created by the distance between consumers and origin. For César Magaña, Cacao Director at BELCO, “the dream of going to the magical origins, the source of sources,” is what drew him to coffee and then chocolate. This results in an interesting situation where, although “most people don’t know where cacao comes from… cacao and coffee—as consumed today—are not that different from the source material or the way people consumed it originally.” According to Magaña, this curiosity stems from a paradox of distance:
Filter coffee is not that distant from how Ethiopians first consumed it. In the same way, Indigenous populations in the Amazon were fermenting cacao and consuming it in a way not that different from today. We add milk, sugar, and spices—but it’s still cacao based. So, we get a beverage or food similar to how it was originally consumed, but we don’t know so much about its origins, and something about those two factors together makes both cacao and coffee an object of curiosity. Both the chocolate and coffee industries play on this tension between familiarity and exoticism: goods that are very much “ours” but are also not.
Stories of origins—mystified or rendered more transparent—participate in convincing consumers of the higher prices of the quality segments in both goods: “As we move into specialty cacao,” explains Magaña, “we face many of the same challenges specialty coffee faced initially. When we started importing and distributing specialty coffee, people thought we were crazy because it was expensive. The same is happening now with cacao. But we know now to be persistent.” He points out that “we’re still in the process of consumer education about high quality cacao.”
And Now: Vanilla
As the bean to bar and third wave of coffee movements take hold, new industries take note. Most recently, the vanilla industry has been working at making its own natural premium product, and some companies are looking to coffee for inspiration.
Vanilla vines can be traced back to about 70 million years ago, to the humid lowland tropical forests of the eastern slopes of the Andes. Like cacao and coffee, vanilla became intertwined with and exploited by European colonial economies—later becoming an important part of the mass consumption culture of the Global North, added to many varied products such as muffins, milkshakes, Coca-Cola, candles, and body soaps. However, the vanilla industry differs from the coffee and cacao industries in one major way: 95 percent of today’s “vanilla” is synthetic, made from guaiacol, which is found in clove oil, wood pulp, and petroleum by-products. Criminal activities (vanilla theft) and climate conditions (storms and cyclones, flooding from deforestation) in vanilla-producing countries like Sri Lanka and Madagascar have resulted in the deteriorating quality and decreased accessibility of high-quality, natural vanilla pods despite a growing consumer demand.[12] (In 2015, Nestlé announced intentions to eliminate all artificial additives to their chocolate;[13] Hershey’s, General Mills, Kellogg’s, and others soon followed.)
As a response to this, companies have been looking for solutions to increase the quality of natural vanilla. Israeli start-up Vanilla Vida has decided to focus on vanilla processing (alongside greenhouse growing) to make natural vanilla both of higher quality and more affordable—and the founders used coffee as their benchmark. According to Gali Fried, the company’s Vice President of Business Development and Marketing, vanilla and coffee are similar, as both “harvest green without flavor,” with post-harvest processes responsible for much of the aroma development—while coffee undergoes roasting, vanilla’s flavor development takes place through a process of “curing” that takes months. Inspired by the way a green coffee’s flavor could change with different roast parameters, Vanilla Vida’s CTO, Raz Krizevski, began to apply a similar approach to the curing process, using different curing methods by controlling temperature, time, and other natural triggers for the enzymes to develop flavor in a particular way. (They’ve now patented this approach, and according to Fried are applying it to other crops.) Like specialty chocolate, they’ve also incorporated some of specialty coffee’s marketing practices. Fried points out:
[Coffee] consumers are asking for not just particular varieties but also specific regions and even specific farmers … so, we seek to do the same thing. To have the most data possible from the farmers we work with, so vanilla consumers can ask for a specific vanilla from a specific farmer in Mexico, Uganda, Israel, or any other location. Vanilla, like coffee, is a very long and complex supply chain involving many "hands." We try to close that knowledge gap—and bring the farmer and the consumer closer together.
And just like the vanilla and cacao industries follow coffee in aspiring to close gaps between production and consumption, so do we seek to bring closer together different industries that seem different but in fact have always intertwined: grown in the same plantations, enslaving the same populations, representing the same romantic ideals, struggling with similar issues of social justice and climate conditions, and deliberately coming closer together through technology migration and shared stories.
This phenomenon has been recently described by sociologists Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre in their book Enrichement.[14] Seeking new ways to create value and convert standard goods to luxury goods, industries turn to other fields in the stories they tell about the goods they make. However, while “value” may ring positive, the act of value creation can lead to multiple meanings and repercussions. Anthropologist Edward (Ted) Fischer has shown in his research on specialty coffee production in Guatemala and in the United States how value creation on one hand of the supply chain disadvantages producers on the other hand—smallholders invested in land and the material means of production but lacking the social and cultural capital to extract surplus symbolic value from their coffee.[15]
Viewed through this perspective, the process described by Boltanski and Esquerre as it occurs in the fine wine, cacao, coffee, and vanilla industries can be observed through a more critical lens. Yes, these industries may share much in common. Highlighting the similarities between them not only may help extract symbolic and economic value but may also promote technological advancements and awareness to challenges that are horizontally affecting different industries (e.g., trade and climate change).
However, tying these very different goods together through romantic imagery and a specific set of attributes for quality can also mask the specific challenges, histories, and nuances of each of them. Just as the wine metaphor may have participated in camouflaging the socio-economic differences between a wine producer and a coffee producer, so can the coffee metaphor direct attention away from the different trade models, geopolitical conditions, and colonial histories of the vanilla and cacao industries. What we might end up getting as a result of these processes is a commodified experience of purchasing morality, consuming quality—a form of conspicuous consumption[16] attesting to our good choices (in the moral and hedonic sense). Furthermore, the values that migrate from coffee to cacao and vanilla may bring about the same issues described by Fischer, privileging producers who hold a higher degree of social and cultural capital (e.g., speaking English, storytelling skills, access to scientific knowledge regarding fermentation techniques).
Coffee has never really stood alone, and we can learn much about what makes it “work” from looking at the uses other industries and their respective fields make of the tools it has developed and the narratives it has crafted. At the same time, this exciting forming of a universe of fine(r), fair(er) goods shouldn’t distract us from the unique aspects of each individual field, be they a challenge or an opportunity. ◇
NOA BERGER is a PhD candidate studying the social construction of quality in the French and Brazilian specialty coffee markets at the École des Hautes Études in Sciences Sociales, Paris.
References
[1] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (London: Routledge, 1984).
[2] Jonathan Morris, Coffee: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2018).
[3] Lorraine Boissonneault, “How Coffee, Chocolate and Tea Overturned a 1,500-Year-Old Medical Mindset,” Smithsonian Magazine (May 17, 2017), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-coffee-chocolate-and-tea-overturned-1500-year-old-medical-mindset-180963339/#:~:text=Chocolate%20was%20described%20by%20European,demand%20for%20all%20three%20exploded.
[4] William Roseberry, “The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States,” American Anthropologist 8, no. 4 (1996): 762–775.
[5] Mario R. Fernández-Alduenda and Peter Giuliano, Coffee Sensory and Cupping Handbook (SCA, 2021).
[6] Lauren Mowery, “Entrepreneur George Howell’s Third Act Focuses On Farms, Terroir, Education As Coffee’s Future,” Forbes (2017), https://www.forbes.com/sites/lmowery/2017/01/31/coffee-entrepreneur-george-howells-third-act-focuses-on-thefuture/?sh=424528d7740d.
[7] Lauren Mowery.
[8] Noa Berger, “On Coffee and Critique,” 18 (2020).
[9] Daniel Monterescu and Noa Berger, “How We Learned to Stop Fearing and Love Quality Coffee,” Haaretz (2019), https://www. haaretz.co.il/food/food-news/2019-12-08/ty-article-magazine/.premium/0000017f-e11c-d7b2-a77f-e31fd6bc0000.
[10] Noa Berger, “French Coffee Refined and Redefined,” 25, Issue 9 (SCA, May 2019). https://sca.coffee/sca-news/25/issue-9/english/french-coffee-refined-and-redefined-25-magazine-issue-9.
[11] For an elaborated discussion of subjectivity and objectivity in coffee evaluation, see the SCA’s 2021 Sensory and Cupping Handbook.
[12] Rosa Abreu-Runkel, Vanilla: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2020).
[13] “Nestlé USA Commits to Removing Artificial Flavors and FDA-Certified Colors from All Nestlé Chocolate Candy by the End of 2015”, businesswire (February 17, 2015), https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150217005211/en/Nestl%C3%A9-USA-Commits-to-Removing-Artificial-Flavorsand-FDA-Certified-Colors-from-All-Nestl%C3%A9-Chocolate-Candy-by-the-End-of-2015.
[14] Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, Enrichissement. Une critique de la marchandise (Paris: Gallimard, 2017).
[15] Edward F. Fischer, “Quality and Inequality: Creating Value Worlds with Third Wave Coffee,” Socio-Economic Review 19, no. 1 (2021): 111–131.
[16] Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/833/pg833-images.html.
We hope you are as excited as we are about the release of 25, Issue 20. This issue of 25 is made possible with the contributions of specialty coffee businesses who support the activities of the Specialty Coffee Association through its underwriting and sponsorship programs. Learn more about our underwriters here.