For my birthday this year I got a tasting set of Valrhona Grands Crus chocolates. Today I had a private little chocolate tasting session.

I found Alpaco (which my brain keeps wanting to turn into Alpaca) the most interesting one, with a spicy, rich flavour. It is both “floral and oaky” according to the wrapper, and while I couldn’t have picked out those overtones on my own, they were definitely there when I went looking for them, and especially the oaky hints were very nice.

Guanaja had a higher cocoa content and a more bitter taste, which I really liked; Caraïbe had hints of coffee. Manjari stood out because I experienced it as the sweetest of the four, with fruity, lemony tones.

It was interesting to experience just how different four bitter chocolates can taste, even when all have roughly the same cocoa content (64–66%, except for Guanaja’s 70%).

Valrhona makes great chocolate but has a pretty but almost-unusable Flash-based web site that I won’t even bother to link to. Instead, go read this review at Chocablog.