It is, by turns, sweetly floral and slightly smoky, rich and roundly mellow - far deeper at first whiff than the thinner, sharper, more ephemeral supermarket extracts I've taken to sniffing. Nature has not been kind to the tropical vanilla patch. But more on that later. Nielsen-Massey's extract begins, just as the bottle says, on Madagascar, the island off the southeastern coast of Africa where yellow orchid blossoms bring forth a single bean that's nurtured and cured and, eventually, shredded and washed in an alcohol bath at an updated factory north of Chicago. Once upon a time, the French claimed Madagascar and nearby Reunion Island, naming it Ile de Bourbon.
Vanilla is anything but plain.
Heat the beans to speed up extraction, and those subtle notes get cooked out. Larger hot processors often do the job in three days. A year ago this month, cyclones tore along the African coast, ripping off warehouse roofs on Madagascar and ruining 100 tons of precious cured vanilla beans. Then it did a number on the vines, reducing yields by a third. Weird weather cycles screwed up things in Indonesia.