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, so our pickings are easier.

Sound bite

There’s no right or wrong way to eat chocolate. But to judge a good cocoa bar, the usual unwrap-and-bite method is not enough, says Chordia. He breaks off a square, smells it, and rolls the piece around on his tongue to note which flavour hits him first. “The cocoa butter in chocolate is what holds all the flavour,” he says. So, when it melts in your mouth, that’s when its flavours really pop. “What I'm doing is paying attention to its shine and gloss, what kind of aroma it gives off, and how long the taste lingers on the tongue,” he says.

Chordia consults for chocolate brands and chocolatiers, who send their samples across to him for tasting. He estimates that he’s tasted over 3,000 types of chocolate since he became a taster in 2015.