SpiceLines

I have come to Veracruz to glimpse the elusive vanilla orchid on the vine, to catch the rich scent of glossy beans curing in the sun, to breathe in the fragrance of the world’s finest vanilla in its Mexican birthplace. Everything up to this point has been a sort of lagniappe, as the Creoles say, a delicious extra. Such is the nature of obsession.

It is about 10:30 AM and as usual, the sun is brutally hot and the air thick with moisture. Norma Gaya is driving the three of us—Susana, Deborah and myself—down a rough dirt road so deeply rutted that we are thrown from side to side as we jounce along at just a few kilometers an hour. I notice that she has woven two vanilla beans in and out of the louvers of the air conditioning vents which are now wafting a faint scent towards us.

Norma lives and breathes vanilla. At 35, she is willowy and cool, a bit ethereal except for the smattering of light freckles across her nose. Today she is wearing a watery aqua silk dress screened with pale lavender orchids. With her sleek hair and delicate sandals, she looks as if she might be throwing a garden party.

But this is a work day. When we arrived at the Gaya Vai-Mex offices in the dusty town of Gutierrez Zamora earlier this morning, she had been on the telephone for hours talking with distributors of her family’s vanilla. Founded in 1879, the company is one of Mexico's leading producers of high quality vanilla extract and plump, flavorful beans. In the past, its customers have included Nielsen Massey, a purveyor of Madagascar, Mexican and Tahitian vanilla to Williams Sonoma and other upscale gourmet stores.

Last year Gaya Vai-Mex bought 28 tons of green vanilla beans from 400 farmers in four states; many of them harvest only a few kilos a year. But Gaya also owns an 11-hectare organic vanilla plantation, where 11,000 vines are planted. This is where we hope to see the orchid in bloom.

We lurch down the road through groves of naranja or orange trees, some heavily laden with fruit. Here and there palms erupt with clusters of bright red berries. Up ahead a brilliant blue and black butterfly swoops and swirls. Norma brakes suddenly. “Look,” she says. “There is a flower.”

We tumble out and gingerly pick our way through tall grass. Vanilla vines are all around us, pale green, with bulbous stems and fleshy leaves, clambering up naranja as well as the native cacuite and pichoco trees which have traditionally been used as tuteurs or supports. Some trees are gnarled and have enormous woody excrescences where they have been repeatedly cut back to reduce the amount of shade they produce; a few spindly branches grow out of these living stumps, but clearly their mission in life is to support the sun-loving vine.

And there it is: A creamy, greenish-yellow blossom, not much bigger than a silver dollar. This is a modest flower, a virginal cousin of the more colorful and lascivious orchids that mimic female genitalia. In the nursery trade, the flower might even be termed “insignificant,” but up close, its delicate petals and perfectly formed lip seem to guard the entrance to an exotic, mysterious world. In the language of the Totonac Indians who originally domesticated vanilla, the flower is called xanat or caxixanath. In Spanish the latter means flor recondita, or “hidden flower.”

Now for the seduction: A man bends close, his brown face a study in concentration. He clasps the flower in one hand and with the other, gently inserts a tiny pointed stick deep into its heart, lifting a flap that separates the pollen-bearing anthers from the female sex organs. With his finger, he bends the anthers onto the stigma, coating them with pollen. Impregnation takes only a few seconds; gestation is nine months. By December, this vine will bear clusters of plump green beans that will be harvested and taken to a warehouse for curing.

Vanilla flowers bloom only once for only a few hours, usually in the morning, and it is during this window that they must be pollinated in order to produce vanilla beans. Though insects randomly perform this service in the wild, yields are bigger and more certain when the blossom is pollinated by hand. The young man standing next to us is a descendant of the ancient Totonacs who were cultivating vanilla as a sacred plant when Cortez landed on the coast of Veracruz in 1518. Every day he and ten other workers walk the plantation, checking each of the 11,000 vines for blossoms that will unfurl tomorrow ,just as his forbears may have done centuries ago.

There is something soft, almost feminine about the traditional way of growing vanilla in Mexico. But it may not be economically viable, especially in a world in which Madagascar, the world’s largest producer, sets the prices. Three years ago, when cyclones devastated the island, prices soared to $500 per kilo. Today, a kilo brings just $100, and many small farmers can no longer afford to grow labor-intensive vanilla.

Norma Gaya has seen the future and it is just down the road: a modern greenhouse, covered with black shade cloth, watered by automatic sprinklers. Here 3,000 vines are planted in raised peat moss beds on split bamboo canes; two to four vines can be planted at the base of each 10-foot cane, then looped up and down to make pollination and harvesting easy. “Outside it takes four years for a vine to bear its first flower; in here, only two,” she explains.

And yet the lure of tradition is strong. Lately she’s been thinking of planting some cojon de gato trees. It’s a very old tree, once thought to be the best companion for the vanilla vine. Who knows? It might be wonderful.

This mural at the Gaya Vai-Mex warehouse depicts the ancient world of
vanilla: blooming orchids on the vine, green uncured beans, and a Totonac
priestess at El Tajin, symbolizing the reverence the Indians held for the plant.

Contrary to what you might think, the vanilla orchid has very little scent. And green vanilla beans don’t smell anything like vanilla extract. The secret of vanilla’s aroma is in the curing of a bean, a labor intensive process if ever there was one. It involves five months of baking, sweating, sunning, aging and all around coddling under the watchful eye of someone with the instinct and experience to know when the moment of perfection has arrived. It’s good to remember this when you feel assaulted by the price of vanilla.

We are at Gaya Vai-Mex’s hilltop warehouse which has glorious views in all directions. The air is heavy with the scent of vanilla: sweet, a little fruity, spicy, alluring. And no wonder: vanilla beans are all around us. There are thousands of dark beans lying in the sun, neatly arranged on woven straw tapetes or mats; tens of thousands more are stacked in long wooden boxes on shelves inside the warehouse. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be bathed in this intoxicating fragrance everyday.

In 2005 Gaya cured 30 tons of beans. The process begins when mature green vanilla pods are delivered to the warehouse. Whole beans are separated from those that have split. They are washed, put in long cedar boxes with screened bottoms, and placed in a big walk-in gas oven where they are baked at 70 degrees centigrade for a day. “The heat stops the maturing process,” explains Norma Gaya who is showing us her family’s business. “The ovens are the same as those used in Italy to cure silk worm cocoons.” (The Gayas came to Mexico from Italy in the late 19th century, possibly intending to farm. Instead, they saw the Totonacs growing vanilla and never looked back.)

Vanilla beans are carefully laid out on straw mats to dry in the sun.
The curing process can take up to 5 months.

The next day the beans are tucked into a deep box, covered with blankets and allowed to sweat. Then for five months they are gently carried in and out of the warehouse; they soak up the sun for a few hours on warm, bright mornings, in the afternoon, they are put to bed in the warehouse. Again and again they sweat. When they are adequately dried—a properly cured bean is 20% water—they are stacked in boxes ten high on racks inside the warehouse and allowed to age. When everything goes right, the beans are glossy, supple and intensely fragrant. After all that work, it’s hard to believe that the current wholesale price for one kilo of beans is just $100.

For centuries vanilla beans cured naturally on the vine. Vine-cured beans are high in vanillin, the phenolic compound which creates vanilla’s distinctive aroma; sometimes the vanillin crystallizes, giving the bean a frosty appearance. “The crystals are like black gold,” Norma says with a rueful smile. “But no one wants to buy them, so the farmers just leave the beans hanging on the vine.” When Hernan Cortez landed in Mexico in 1519, the Aztec emperor Moctezuma served him cups of cold bitter chocolate flavored with vanilla gathered in the wild. At first, the Spaniards hated the taste of chocolate, but when the Aztecs told them vanilla was an aphrodisiac, they were interested. Eventually Cortez took both back to Spain, igniting a craze.

Norma’s 72-year-old uncle Orlando is Gaya’s curing maestro. He is a burly, white haired man with a genial smile, but he keeps a close eye on the vanilla beans lying in the sun. He decides when the beans have dried out enough and when the flavor has reached its peak. Moisture control is critical: The alternative is rot and ruin.

Later we follow Orlando in his pickup truck to his own plantation. Towering over his cinderblock house is a nacaste tree, over six feet in diameter and nearly 40 feet tall. Clambering up this gargantuan trunk is an equally gargantuan vanilla vine, fatter and more bulbous than any of the well-mannered vines we have seen earlier in the day. “This is vanilla pompona,” says Orlando, as he points to a super-sized greenish yellow orchid 30 feet up in the branches of the tree. “It blooms only one day between 6 A.M and 11 A.M. When it opens, big flies come and pollinate it.”

Vanilla pompona is said to have a cherry-like aroma and is used primarily in perfume and non-food applications. Most culinary vanilla comes from vanilla planifolia, and it is this variety that is widely grown from Mexico to Madagascar. Tahitian vanilla is a hybrid of the two; its intensely floral aroma comes from the pompona side of the family.

Orlando is completely in his element as he leads us down an overgrown path, past lushly planted naranja, cocuite and pichoco, the three trees traditionally grown as tuteurs for vanilla vines. But unlike Gaya’s neat and orderly plantation, this is a vanilla jungle. Four to eight vines are planted at the base of each tree—10,000 in just three hectares—and though the growth is rampant, he knows exactly which flowers must be pollinated the next day. There are also lychee, pistachio and palm trees here; exotic birds screech as they flutter through the dense woods; butterflies float in the air.

It’s paradise, of a sort. Back at his house, Orlando offers us vodka in a tin cup. Caught off guard—well, it’s barely noon—we demur. With a wolfish grin, he raises his cup to us: “Two shots of vodka in the morning, hot milk with vanilla at night.” And he winks. Later over lunch, Norma rolls her eyes. “You should have been here last year. So many women…”