Vanilla glossary - ANTOKALY | Rare vanillas from Madagascar

The plant

Vanilla planifolia: The main species of cultivated vanilla. Its register is intense, woody, buttery, cocoa-like, sometimes rum raisin, with other notes according to the terroir that carries it.
Vanilla tahitensis: A second cultivated species, with a lighter register. It shows itself floral, fruity, aniseed or honeyed according to its environment and its conduct.
Vanilla pompona: The third species worked by ANTOKALY. Its pods are wider and larger, some reach thirty grams.
Wild vanilla: A vanilla that grows and reproduces without human intervention. Madagascar holds several species, from the rocks of the north to the spiny thickets of the deep south.
Leafless: Without leaves. Seven wild Malagasy vanillas carry thick green stems, reduced to scales where a Planifolia unfolds its leaves. Drought shaped this form.
Vine: Vanilla is a climbing orchid. It rises towards the light leaning on a support, living or not. On our plots, that support is a tree.
Agroforestry: A cultivation led under forest canopy, where vanilla is associated with spices, fruit trees and everything the forest carries around it. This living environment takes part in the balance of the plot and in the way the vine ripens.
Cutting: A fragment of vine that grows back into a whole plant. Cultivated vanilla is propagated this way, without seed, each plot descending from a small number of original plants. It was by cutting that the vine left the Gulf of Mexico for the glasshouses of Europe and then for the Indian Ocean.
Vanillon: The name given to a small-calibre Vanilla pompona. The pod is short and broad, its register leaning towards candied fruit and tobacco. The word appears in nineteenth-century market listings, quoted separately from Bourbon vanilla.

The gesture

Hand pollination: In vanilla, the male organ and the female organ occupy the same column, separated by a thin membrane, the rostellum. Spontaneous fertilisations exist but remain rare. The hand crosses that partition and brings the regularity a cultivation demands.
Marieuse: The woman who fertilises the flowers by hand, one by one, at first light. A single morning can count 1,500 of them.
Artificial fertilisation: The nineteenth-century term for hand pollination. The first written trace dates from 1836, in a glasshouse in Liège. What Edmond Albius brought a few years later on Bourbon Island was the form of the gesture that holds across a whole plantation.

The preparation

Scalding: The pods are briefly plunged into a hot bath. The thermal shock launches the enzymatic activity and opens the aromatic cycle.
Sweating: The pods rest in covered crates. The retained heat prolongs the enzymatic reaction and begins the browning.
Drying: An exposure to the sun a few hours a day, then a slow phase in the shade on ventilated racks. The humidity recedes, the structure firms up, the aromas concentrate.
Maturation: The long time that follows the drying, also called ageing. The oils blend, the secondary notes appear, the length settles in. It is at that moment that the origin becomes fully readable.

The pod

Naturally split pod: A pod that reached full maturity on the vine, whose capsule opened by itself along its length. After preparation, it gives a generous infusion, round and blended.
Whole pod: A pod harvested before the capsule opens. Its closed envelope holds the material and gives a more restrained expression at the start.
Frost: A natural crystallisation of vanillin on the surface of the pod. It forms on pods very rich in vanillin, whose molecule crystallises on contact with the air.
Marokintana: The name ANTOKALY gives to pods carrying frost. They can be split or whole and stand apart by a particular aromatic intensity.
Vanillin: The most recognisable molecule of the vanilla aroma, formed during the preparation. Frost appears from a content of 2.3%.

The origin

SAVA: The region of north-east Madagascar where ANTOKALY is anchored. A major area of Malagasy vanilla, marked by the reliefs, the forests, the tropical humidity and a culture passed on over time.
Bourbon vanilla: A name that refers to the Indian Ocean and to vanillas of the Vanilla planifolia type, grown notably in Madagascar and on Réunion, formerly called Île Bourbon. It gives an origin, the lot tells the material.
Tlilxochitl: The Nahuatl name for vanilla, built on tlilli, black, with xochitl, flower. It names the dried pod, black and glossy, not the flower of the vine. The first European sources carry it over before substituting a word of their own.
Vainilla: The Spanish diminutive of vaina, sheath. It describes the shape of the pod, not its scent or its colour. From this word come the English vanilla, the French vanille and the Italian vaniglia.
Bundle of 50 stems: The unit of sale for vanilla at the end of the seventeenth century. Coffee was weighed by the hundredweight while vanilla was counted by the stem, tied into bundles as it came off the drying racks. An edict of January 1692 capped its price at 18 livres.
Nosy Be: The island off north-western Madagascar where vanilla growing first took hold, from 1870 onwards. Production then moved to the north-east coast, which would become the SAVA. That is where the vine found its ground.