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Pairing Chocolate and Wine with Turkish Bean to Bar

There’s so much advice, so many opinions and stories about pairing wine and chocolate floating around. The dos and don’ts of pairing the two can be a little complicated. On the one hand, even dark chocolate is sweet which makes pairing it with dry wine tricky. On the other hand, milk or dark chocolate are really wrong with sweet (white) wines. If you want to be on the safe side, chocolate with sweet red wine is usually a winner. But why limit yourself?

A few years ago, an Instagram algorithm introduced me to a local chocolate maker and I felt inspired to pair wine with her chocolates. The pairing was fun to do, but the chocolate let me down a little. The flavor additions to the bars all sounded really interesting: citrus, lavender, and marzipan; sage, lime butter, and lemon; pink pepper and strawberry; and raspberry, rose, and lemon. But none of them tasted like much. Needless to say, I never ordered again. 

Recently my friend L told me about a chocolate shop she’d discovered. Tucked away on a back street in Ortaköy, she assured me that this was a proper bean to bar operation. I trust her taste buds, so I was excited to visit them with her. 

Peraru Chocolate

The couple behind Peraru may have the only true bean to bar chocolate shop in Turkey, but their road to chocolate was actually paved by coffee beans! In 2019, Gonca Ünal Sezer and Coşkun Sezer began researching coffee in order to learn what really makes a good cup o’ joe. Their research took them all the way to the beginning to the growing of coffee beans. Along the way, they realized that cocoa was grown in the same climate. They learned what chocolate outside of mass production factories can taste like, and that began their journey to ‘bean to bar’ chocolate production.

Gonca and Coşkun dove into a delicious study of chocolate, tasting various origins and cocoa contents. They discovered how different chocolate could taste depending on the origin of the beans. Along the way they fell in love with the process, purity of flavors, and the revelation that the darkest of chocolate does not have to be bitter! They established Peraru in 2021, naming it after Istanbul’s Pera neighborhood which hosted many of the Constantinople’s “firsts” including introducing patisserie culture and chocolate to the city. 

What is Bean to Bar Chocolate?

Making chocolate, especially artisanal chocolate, is a significantly more involved process than a lot of people realize, especially bean to bar chocolate. But what is bean to bar chocolate? 

The simple answer, is that it’s an approach in which chocolate producers fully control the production process, starting from the cocoa bean. Instead of buying pre-made chocolate to create bars and other confections, producers choose the origin of the cocoa beans and process the beans themselves. By controlling all the steps of chocolate production, producers determine the flavor and character of the end product. These are usually small scale operations that allow total oversight throughout the whole process. 

Bean to bar chocolate production also has a sense of sustainability missing from a lot of mass-produced chocolate (mass-produced anything really). Because thee chocolatiers are involved in every step, they often feel a sense of duty to support supply chain transparency and ethical practices. 

How is Bean to Bar Chocolate Made?

Bean to Bar chocolate begins on the branches of the cocoa tree. Interestingly, cocoa (unlike grapes!) has two harvest a year. Laborers hand-pick the pods which are then cracked open to reveal the pulpy interior hiding the beans. 

Like grapes, cocoa beans are fermented! There are a number of ways to do this, but for Peraru, the slippery pulp and beans go into large wooden vats. These are covered with banana leaves to help maintain fermentation temperature. During the fermentation process, beans begin to turn brown. They require regular mixing (kind of like punch downs for wine!). It takes five to seven days for the cocoa beans to complete the fermentation process and be ready for the next step.

After fermentation, beans still have a moisture content of 50-60% and so are dried (usually under the sun) for four to eight days to reduce that to 6-8%. 

Gonca and Coşkun research and taste beans and chocolate from around the world to decide from where they want to order. When I visited, they had beans from Tanzania, Belize, India, Peru, and Madagascar. They were waiting for their first-ever shipment of beans from Venezuela, so I can’t wait to go back and try those! Beans arrive in sealed bags covered with burlap. Before starting their process, Gonca and Coşkun sort through all the beans. They’re checking for beans that have not fermented enough, are cracked or broken, trash that made it into the bags, and other things unsuitable for chocolate.

 Next, the roasting. This step doesn’t get enough attention from most of us chocolate eaters. For example…many people (myself included before this visit) consider dark chocolate to be bitter. It doesn’t have to be! In fact, we tasted a 100% bar (i.e. no sugar added) which Coşkun called “pressed cocoa” instead of chocolate. It was tannic, but not bitter. Like Starkbucks coffee beans, chocolate becomes bitter when over roasted! That’s why Gonca and Coşkun spend a lot of time figuring out the perfect roast for the different origins. With new origins (like the upcoming Venezuela) they roast in small batches until they discover the perfect amount of heat and time needed to release the beans’ unique flavor and aroma profile.

Ever heard of cocoa nibs? That, along with the shell encasing it, is what makes up a cocoa bean and is the base of chocolate. At Peraru, they use the nibs for chocolate and the shells for chocolate tea! Zero waste. 

After crushing the beans and separating the nibs from the shell, it’s time to melanger. Melanger is not actually a verb. It’s a fancy French word essentially meaning ‘stone mill’ and is the name of the small apparatus (that today still uses granite stones!) that crushes the nibs and sugar. Over the course of two to three days, everything is ground into smooth, shiny chocolate.

Also like wine (so many parallels!) chocolate has to mature! Gonca and Coşkun pour still warm chocolate from the melanger into molds. After those bars harden, they’re packaged in airtight containers and left to mature in the workshop for two to four weeks. Peraru’s website says, and I love the wording here: “This is the time it takes for the molecules to find their place and for the chocolate flavors to emerge and settle.”

It’s not done yet! Next comes the tempering stage. They melt the bars at 50C which loosens the fat molecules (if only my diet were so easy). Next, they lower the temp to around 28-29 C, locking the fat and oil. The temp gets raised again, this time to 31C at which point the chocolate is fluid and pourable. Why bother tempering, you might ask? Not only does it add to the gloss strength of the chocolate, it enriches its aromas. 

The Bean to Bar Experience

When I arrived in their shop, the melanger was doing its work, churching shiny chocolate and filling the small shop with its rich, warm aromas. Like the fat, greedy kid from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I felt extremely tempted to stick my hand in and scoop up some of the deliciousness! 

I did refrain from doing so though. 

We met Coşkun that day and he explained the whole bean to bar process to us. After that, we got to taste the chocolate! We went through all eight of his chocolates AND tasted Peraru’s own Nutella (no palm oil here, thank you!). 

You can find Peraru a short walk from the main street of Ortaköy: Mecidiye, Şht. Nuri Pamir Sk. No:4 D:6A, 34347 Beşiktaş. You can visit them for your own chocolate discovery Monday through Saturday from 11:00 – 19:00 and Sunday from 12.