HERITAGE
LOVA — the Malagasy word for heritage
ORIGINS · 15th CENTURY
A sacred orchid, born on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.
Long before it bore the name vanilla, the Totonac people of Mexico’s east coast were already cultivating this climbing orchid, which they called xanat. The Aztecs adopted it in turn, married it to the cocoa bean in the drink xocolātl, and offered it to Hernán Cortés in 1519. For three centuries Mexico held an absolute monopoly on its cultivation, protected by an invisible accomplice: the melipona bee, the only creature able to pollinate the flower in its native habitat.
Every attempt to export the vine to other tropics failed. The plants grew, they flowered, and they stayed sterile. A plant travelled, but its secret remained in Veracruz.
“Aplanttravelled,butitssecretremainedinVeracruz.”
1841 · ÎLE BOURBON
The gesture of a twelve-year-old boy that changed the history of gastronomy.
On Île Bourbon — today’s Réunion — Edmond Albius, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy, watched the sterile vines of his master Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont day after day. One morning in 1841 he found the gesture European botanists had been seeking for decades: with a fine thorn and a simple press of the thumb, he lifted the rostellum, brought stamen and pistil into contact, and fertilised the flower.
The gesture takes three to five seconds. It freed vanilla from its geography. Every pod grown outside Mexico, to this day, is born of that precise movement, repeated flower after flower, by human hands.
Albius died in poverty in 1880, having never profited from his discovery. His name, long forgotten, nonetheless underpins everything LOVA VANILLA stands for: the irreducible value of the human gesture against industry.
1880 · MADAGASCAR
Why the Sava, and nowhere else.
In 1880 the first Planifolia cuttings crossed the Mozambique Channel. Planters from Réunion passed on the Albius technique to Malagasy growers in the north-east. The terroir answered immediately.
The Sava — an acronym of Sambava, Antalaha, Vohémar and Andapa — brings together a rare set of conditions: black volcanic soils rich in organic matter, steady heat around 27°C, 85% humidity through the flowering season, and an alternation of heavy rains and dry spells that paces the ripening. To that add the primary forest still bordering the plantations, which gives the vine the shade it needs.
Within a few decades Madagascar became the world’s leading producer. Today the Grande Île accounts for around 80% of Bourbon Planifolia production, and the Sava alone represents more than half of it.
80%
Madagascar’s share of world Bourbon production
25,000 km²
Area of the Sava region
8 to 9 months
Ripening of the pod on the vine
THE GESTURE · THE SOUL
A craft that is never written down. It is shown, hand against hand.
In the Sava, vanilla is not a production. It is a trade. And a trade that cannot be learned from a book. The curer who plunges a bare hand into the scalding water to judge its temperature — around 65°C, but never with a thermometer — learned it from his father, who held it from his. The woman who pollinates one to two thousand flowers in a single morning, between dawn and ten o’clock, before the flower closes forever, learned the gesture at six years old, following her mother down the rows.
Every family in the Sava keeps its own rhythms, its own secrets: the exact length of the sweating under jute blankets, the tilt of the wicker baskets in the sun, the precise moment the pod turns from brown to deep black. These gestures have never been standardised. They never will be. That is precisely what separates an industrial pod from a pod of the Sava.
LOVA VANILLA does not invent this craft. It selects it, at source, lot by lot, from families we know by name.
“Thehumanhandastheonlyinstrumentofprecision.”
THE PATH
The path of a single pod
October — January
The flower
Each vanilla flower opens only once a year, and only for a few hours at dawn. The planter walks the vines before daybreak, picks out the open flowers, lifts the rostellum with a bamboo thorn, presses the stamen onto the pistil. Three to five seconds per flower. One to two thousand flowers per morning. A flower missed is a pod lost.
February — June
The ripening
Once fertilised, the pod takes eight to nine months to form on the vine. It moves from pale green to deep green, fills out, and builds up the glucovanillin that will later become aroma. At this stage it is still odourless. All of its perfume is dormant.
July — August
The scalding
The harvested pods are plunged for three minutes into water heated to 65°C, in wicker baskets held by two operators. This bath halts the vegetal life of the pod — what is called mortification — and releases the enzymes that begin the aromatic development. The precision is measured by hand, without instruments.
August
The sweating
Wrapped in jute blankets and laid in wooden crates, the pods sweat for 24 to 48 hours. They turn from green to chocolate brown. The first notes appear. This step is the soul of the Bourbon method: it cannot be rushed.
September — March
The curing
Six to nine months in padded trunks, in the shade, in silence. The pods lose their residual moisture and gain their suppleness. The aromas grow complex: cocoa, blond tobacco, leather, dried fruit. This long stretch of time cannot be made up later. It is what separates a decent vanilla from a Grand Cru.
9 months on the vine + 6 to 9 months of curing = close to 18 months between the flower and your kitchen.
OUR VALUES
What Lova means.
Heritage
The word lova in Malagasy. Five generations of gestures on the same land.
Rarity
Grade 17 to 20 cm. Less than 3% of the Sava harvest.
Craft
Pollination in 3 to 5 seconds per flower. Curing 6 to 9 months in trunks.
Preciousness
Selected lot by lot. Individual glass tube. Traceability by number.
“Making every pod a rare object is our only discipline.”