Has Wonka tried this?

Craft chocolate isn't just chocolatey – it can be fruity, spicy and complex too. Forget creaminess, forget wine terms. Professional tasters are building their own vocabulary

- Christalle Fernandes

We know how to describe a good wine, how to choose the right coffee beans, and which artisanal cheese to pick for a charcuterie board. We drop terms such as ‘robust’, ‘nutty’, and ‘sharp’ when we're describing certain flavour qualities. “And yet, when it comes to craft chocolate, there’s no standard terminology,” says L Nitin Chordia, 46, chocolate taster and founder of Kocoatrait, a bean-to-bar chocolate brand and Cocoashala, a chocolate-making institute. “That’s because the community of chocolate tasters, both in India and globally, is still small.”

But as India’s obsession with good chocolate grows, we're going to need a wider vocabulary to make sense of it all. See how those who grow cacao, make chocolate, and taste the delicious final product tread through the field.

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