Showcolat Festival Bordeaux 2026: An immersion in the land of exceptional cocoa

Bordeaux, a city of wine, is also a land of culinary delights. The Showcolat festival recently took place from May 1st to 3rd, 2026. For a weekend, it transformed the Gironde city into the world capital of cocoa. Held in the Palais de la Bourse, this event offered the opportunity to meet artisans passionate about the same delicacy: chocolate. Between artisanal expertise, ethical commitment, and a sensory journey to the other side of the world, let's look back at an event that captivated the people of Bordeaux.

The "Bean to Bar" revolution: The return to real taste

While the term " Bean to Bar " is flourishing on packaging, it hides a demanding artisanal reality. Literally "from bean to bar," this movement, which originated in the United States about twenty years ago, is restoring the prestige of the chocolatier-roaster's craft.

A high-precision process

Unlike a chocolatier who buys their chocolate in the form of industrial pistoles to transform it into candies, the Bean to Bar artisan is involved from the very beginning. The process is lengthy and requires specific equipment.

• Sourcing: the artisan selects bags of dried beans directly from the plantations (often through short supply chains). He goes directly to the plantations to make his selection.
• Sorting and roasting: each origin (Venezuela, Madagascar, Peru...) requires a tailor-made roasting process to reveal its aromas without burning them.
• Winnowing: the shell is separated from the bean to keep only the "groats" (the heart of the bean).
• Grinding and conching: the beans are ground for 24 to 72 hours with a little sugar. This is when the texture becomes silky and the acidity evaporates.

Why is this a revolution for the consumer?

Here, there's no soy lecithin, artificial flavorings, or added vegetable fats. Just cocoa and sugar (and sometimes a little cocoa butter for a melt-in-your-mouth texture).
As with wine, we talk about terroir. A 70% Venezuelan bar will taste completely different from a 70% Tanzanian one. You'll discover notes of red fruit, tobacco, citrus, or flowers in a completely natural way.
By buying directly from producers, Bean to Bar artisans often pay two to three times the market price for cocoa, ensuring a decent life for the farmers.

The Bean To Bar in Bordeaux

The Showcolat festival highlighted this ethos. Bordeaux, an estuary city where colonial goods once arrived, is reconnecting with its history by becoming a hub for these new cocoa purists. Tasting a Bean to Bar chocolate bar means accepting that chocolate is no longer a mass-produced item, but a product to be savored with complexity.

Stopover in Venezuela for the 2026 edition

This year, the festival celebrated Venezuela, an iconic country for any cacao lover. Home to the renowned Criollo, the rarest and finest cacao bean in the world, the Venezuelan delegation transported visitors to the heart of the plantations. Through lectures and guided tastings, we discovered how terroir—this blend of climate, soil, and ancestral know-how—shapes the character of exceptional chocolate.

Learning through play: The workshop experience

Showcolat is also an opportunity to get hands-on. Numerous workshops punctuated the event: wine and chocolate pairings or an introduction to sensory tasting.

The Bordeaux Gironde Guide had the privilege of participating in one of these workshops: Recognizing a great chocolate by Céline Jaffredou, specialist in sensory education applied to chocolate.

The triangulation challenge: Can you find the odd one out?

The exercise began with a rigorous protocol borrowed from the world of wine and coffee: triangulation. The principle is simple yet formidable: three chocolate samples are presented to us. Two are identical, one is different. By sight, then by taste, we had to hunt down the odd one out. This exercise forces us to look beyond the overall impression and focus on the details:

• The strength of cocoa;
• The acidity that awakens the taste buds;
• Balanced or dominant bitterness.

This is where we become aware of the stark difference between conventional chocolate, often smoothed and standardized, and specialty chocolate, which carries the raw identity of its territory.

Olfactory memory: The challenge of the vials

The second part of the workshop put our noses to the test with the famous "Coffee Nose" tool. Faced with a dozen small vials containing pure aromas, we had to guess the hidden scents: leather, blueberry, honey, basil, pea, green bell pepper... It's an exercise in humility : you recognize a smell, it's "right on the tip of your nose," but the word eludes you. By isolating the aromas (fruity, floral, woody, or roasted notes), this exercise gave us the vocabulary necessary to finally describe with precision the aromatic complexity of a fine chocolate.

A journey of flavors through the stands

Strolling through the aisles, inside the beautiful Palais de la Bourse building, the diversity of exhibitors is impressive.

The fair was an invitation to leisurely gourmet browsing. Each stand represented a region of the world or a country, with passionate artisans explaining the meticulous selection of their beans.

The surprise also lay in the form:

• Cocoa water: an amazing drink, extracted from the white pulp surrounding the bean (the mucilage), with a fresh and tangy taste, far from the bitterness of chocolate.
• Comforting and unusual drinks: between the smooth hot chocolates prepared according to the rules of the art and the surprising chocolate liqueurs, the taste buds were in constant awakening.

A must-see event in Bordeaux

The Bordeaux Cocoa Show successfully combines education with enjoyment. You leave not only with a few well-filled bags, but also with a greater awareness of what a quality cocoa industry represents. If you missed this edition, get your taste buds ready for the next one: it's a sensory experience that will change you.

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