Michel Cluizel
1ers Crus de Plantation sampler
Cluizel has published plantation-level sourcing since 1997, and the 1ers Crus de Plantation box is the canonical way to taste single-plantation cacao side by side — several origins, one purchase, one sitting. For anyone trying to learn what origin actually means in the cup, a comparative flight teaches more than any single bar.
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- Maker
- Michel Cluizel · France
- Type
- sampler
- Cacao
- mixed (sampler)
- Status
- draft
A single bar tells you what one cacao tastes like. It cannot tell you what origin means, because there is nothing to compare it against. The only reliable way to learn that is to taste several origins in one sitting, made by one maker, to one recipe philosophy, so that the variable under test is the cacao and not the chocolatier.
That is what this box is for.
Plantation-level, not country-level
Michel Cluizel has published plantation-level sourcing since 1997 — not "Madagascar" but a named estate in Madagascar. This is a finer resolution than most of the industry offers even now, and it is the same resolution our archive tries to hold: an origin is a place with coordinates, not a flag.
The box spans several of these single-plantation bars. Two of them map cleanly onto archive records — Mokaya, from the Soconusco region of Chiapas, and Mangaro, from the Sambirano valley of Madagascar. The others in the series draw on Papua New Guinea, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and São Tomé, but the plantation-to-record mapping for those is not documented tightly enough for us to cross-link with confidence, so we have not.
How to taste it
Taste in ascending order of intensity rather than ascending percentage, cleanse with water rather than bread, and write something down before reading anyone else's notes — including ours. The value of a flight is that it calibrates your own palate against itself. Soconusco and Sambirano are a good opening pair precisely because they are so unlike each other: one is the historic heartland of Mesoamerican cacao, the other a valley whose bright, acidic profile is so distinctive that it is often used to teach the concept of origin character in the first place.
What we have not done
The Open Cacao Index editorial team has not tasted this box, and Cluizel does not publish a fixed descriptor set for the series, so this page carries no tasting notes at all rather than borrowed ones. This record carries status draft.
Origins in this product
Sources
- Michel Cluizel 2026, '1ers Crus de Plantation' — https://www.cluizel.com/