Zotter to Maribor, Slovenia
How do you pass up a visit to a real-life Willa Wonka factory? The answer is, you don’t. I reserved a time slot online to visit the Zotter Schokoladen Manufaktur in Riegersburg, Austria, just an hour from my hotel in Graz.
It was wild that one of the most revered chocolate makers in the world was located in rural Austria surrounded by rolling hills and farmland. Owner Josef Zotter opened his chocolate factory in the village where he grew up in 1999.
After parking at company headquarters and scanning my online ticket (somehow, it wasn’t golden), I entered the Zotter Chocolate world. Zotter is the only chocolate maker in Europe that is “bean-to-bar”. That means they take shipments of raw cocoa beans from Latin America and handle every aspect of production in-house.
Visitors followed a path through the busy plant with opportunities to sample product throughout the process. More than 300 flavors of Zotter chocolate were available and you were free to spend as much time exploring and tasting as you liked. There were small water stations where you could cleanse your palate between tastings. Yes, they took their business very seriously here.
I tried to pace myself but the chocolate was overwhelming. There were expected varieties like milk, dark and white chocolate plus crazy combinations incorporating fruits, flowers, spices, alcohol and nuts.
You pulled little levers on the conveyor belts to break off samples from the endless lines of chocolate bars. Zotter also provided you a personal tasting spoon for the multiple chocolate fountains plus a notebook where you could write down your reactions to samples. Of course there was a store at the end of the tour where you could purchase your favorite treats.
Through it all, I kept thinking about Üter, the German foreign exchange student on The Simpsons, and his marzipan Joy Joys mit iodine.
I rode out my chocolate high in the car as I traveled south through the Austrian countryside to the Slovenian border.
For an American in a car, European radio is a mixed bag. As you scan the dial, you come across a little of everything from “oldies” stations with Oom-pah bands and yodeling to pulsating Euro pop stations to psuedo-American music stations that play songs from artists you’ve never heard of back in the States.
On the rare occasion when you do land on a song you recognize, you turn it up. That’s why I was rocketing across Austria with my speakers blaring to Kelly Clarkson… whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger…”
I crossed the Austrian-Slovenian border and soon rolled into the city of Maribor, my destination for the evening.
Maribor wasn’t very big. It only took me about an hour to hike through most of town. Even though I was just 20 minutes from the Austrian border, it felt like a completely different world.
I turned a corner and saw something that made me laugh. Here in Slovenia they had a Stars and Stripes western fashion store where you could “discover your lifestyle”. There were even signs for line dancing lessons.
Remember Alan Jackson’s Gone Country song from back in 1994? Evidently he was right all along.
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Thanks for coming along on the trip. If you have questions or suggestions, tweet @JasonRMatheson. Missed an entry? Click here.
