Pointe Baptiste Estate

Alan Napier began making chocolate in his own kitchen in 2010, working with just four cacao trees on his family's 25-acre Pointe Baptiste estate near Calibishie. His grandparents, the Scottish emigres Elma and Lennox Napier, built the estate's 1930s guesthouse and gardens; Alan turned part of that inheritance into Dominica's first homegrown chocolate operation, planting out roughly 200 more trees and building a solar-powered factory about five years after that first batch. The line has grown to fourteen bar recipes made only from trinitario cocoa, sugar cane, cocoa butter and natural flavourings - dark, milk, ginger, chilli, tangerine, lemongrass and coffee among them - alongside rum truffles, dried fruit dipped in chocolate, and cocoa husk tea and vinegar made from the parts of the pod that don't go into the bars. The factory opens daily, 9:30am to 5pm, for twenty-to-forty-minute walk-in tours that trace the process from tree to bar for a nominal fee, ending with a tasting. It is a small, vertically integrated operation - grown, processed, and sold on one hillside estate - built from a hobbyist's four trees into the island's reference chocolate maker within about fifteen years.