First the family roasting company, then a wine shop and now the adventure of making chocolate with Slow Food, the last bid of the Tuscan Andrea Trinci.
The history of Trinci roasting company begins in Florence in 1939. It is run by Ercole Trinci who decides to move the roasting shop to Pistoia just a few years later. In 1971 Andrea joins the company and decides to continue the roasting with wood which gives coffee a considerable balance and aroma. In 1982 the passion for wine brings Andrea and his sister Chiara to open a wine shop. This is a golden moment for wine thanks to the revival of the Italian oenology: the Trinci take advantage of the more tested market of wine to offer their coffee to different Italian restaurants. All is going very well when in 1992 Andrea decides to sell the roasting company to an industrial group that can guarantee international visibility to his coffee. Andrea remains inside the company as quality advisor.
The following ten years are not easy, with great satisfactions (his coffee, exported in different European countries, is also served to the ministers of G8) but also few divergences.
In 2002 the nostalgia of craftsmanship brings him to start from scratch once again: he finds a hundred square meters shop in Cascine di Buti, a small town in the surroundings of Pisa and opens his new workshop.
The secluded location is a real challenge but the strong interest of the press for his work brings his old customers back as well as new ones. Some months later, an old friend, importer of cocoa, gets him to begin a new adventure: the artisan making of chocolate. Andrea spends a lot of time making unfruitful experiments until, after a whole year, he reaches the target he was looking for: a raw chocolate, with a strong flavour, obtained without the conching method, the dough and rolling process (the remixing through a vertical blade inside the conch) which makes the pasta more fluid.
In order of time, the last challenge of Andrea Trinci is the cooperation with Slow Food. Bound to the movement since 1988, Andrea is involved in a new project that he grants immediately and that is now giving him great satisfactions: teaching to toast the Huehuetenango coffee (Guatemalan, Slow Food Presidium) to a few guests of Le Vallette prison in Turin. Managed by the social cooperative Pausa Cafè, the roasting of the jail employs convicts who must deal not only with the roasting procedures but also with packaging, warehouse management, cleaning, maintenance of premises and equipments: a successful idea which has been able to combine the social commitment with the safeguard of biodiversity.
Angelo Surrusca from SPECCHIO of LA STAMPA - march 4, 2006
