Sotto Chocolate is hand-crafted in small batches of less than 50 bars at a time by me, Amy Vachon…a chocolate maker, violinist and clinical pharmacist. It all started with a passion for craft chocolate tasting, which my husband Marc literally fed by gifting me with a monthly bean-to-bar chocolate subscription one year. This opened my eyes and tongue and nose to the unbelievable differences between cacao beans from Madagascar vs Belize vs Brazil and everywhere on the equator in between. I started to read all I could find about chocolate, beginning with Simran Sethi’s excellent Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love.

Again the following year, Marc surprised me with a small melanger - the first real required equipment for a chocolate maker. I found pioneer John Nanci’s Chocolate Alchemy website and with his excellent tutorials I was able to make my first batch in early 2017. It wasn’t so easy, but I was hooked! I have since trained in bean-to-bar chocolate making with Ecole Chocolat and then refined my skills by studying under my mentors, Mackenzie Rivers (Map Chocolate) and Natalie Suwanprakorn (Xoconat) of The Next Batch school, whose passion for educating and inspiring the next generation of tiny craft chocolate companies is unparalleled. What I found was that the craft chocolate world meant a lot of botany and chemistry, married to a heap of social justice, creativity and sensory delight.

I’m a pharmacist by training - a chemist of medications, so to speak. Making chocolate brings out my penchant for molecular facts, and perhaps gives me the patience to test batch after batch, ask question after question, and keep making better chocolate with the scientific method. And I’m an avid amateur violinist. In creating a chocolate company around my love of music, I wanted a name and a logo that spoke to it. After thinking for months, I literally pulled out a musical dictionary and started with A…when I got to S, I had found my name.

Sotto means ‘under,’ most often written in music as ‘sotto voce’ to convey an undertone…something worth paying attention to that is happening underneath other notes. Chocolate is one of the most complex foods on earth, with flavors under flavors. My logo, designed with love by my dear musical friend and graphic arts professor Karen Kresge, is a stylized violin bridge, with cocoa pods where the holes on a regular bridge would be. To me, the bridge is the perfect symbol of beauty washing over and under and around us, with the music flowing from the violinist’s bow and swirling where it is destined to go. I hope, as you taste my chocolate, you will pause to notice the music it creates in your mouth - the early notes of the chocolate’s theme, how the notes deepen in the exposition, and what they bring to your tongue and nose in the coda of each bite.

The cacao beans used to make each Sotto Chocolate bar originate from a single fermentary, using the most ethically priced and harvested sources. They are then sorted, roasted, cracked, winnowed, ground, conched, tempered and wrapped locally in my tiny chocolatory in Watertown, Massachusetts. I do add a small (for dark chocolate) or medium (for milk chocolate) amount of separate ethically-sourced, single origin cocoa butter. Enjoy!