Many people have asked us about doing chocolate tastings. Chocolate is a wonderful food because there are so many subtle flavors in each bite. Much like fine wine fine chocolate has a unique flavor profile that is determined by genetics, growing conditions, fermentation, roasting and other processing techniques. Knowing a little bit about the main flavors of each bar can help you enjoy the experience as the chocolate melts on your tongue. With each shipment of chocolate we always include a short tasting guide. (You can also download a pdf of the tasting guide) Now we don’t list every flavor of each bar but we try to hit the major ones.

We’ve also found that tasting wheels are tremendously useful for tasting chocolate. These have long been used with wine and cheese tastings. As best we can determine Jean Luca of Domori Chocolate introduced their use into chocolate tastings.

Bittersweet Café in San Francisco has kindly allowed us to distribute a version of their tasting wheel. (Click on the image to get a high resolution PDF)

Dr. MaryAnne Drake of North Carolina State University’s Department of Food Science Sensory Service Center also allowed us to use the cheese tasting wheel (pun intended) that she developed. It will be useful, I believe, to use for pairing chocolate and cheese. In fact, we used this very same wheel during our chocolate/cheese pairing seminar for the American Cheese Society on August 8th.

At the American Cheese society meeting we did two chocolate-cheese pairings.

We first paired Cypress Grove Cheveré Humboldt Fog with our Montanya. You want to put the Montanya melt in your mouth first. Then put the layer cake in your mouth with the chocolate ganache you’ve formed there.

Major Farm Vermont Shepherd with our Jembrana Milk. With this one we put the chocolate and the cheese together and chunked it. Chew it together and mix it all in your mouth.

As you can see how one eats the chocolate and cheese pairings plays an amazing part to the pairing. This is because different parts of your tongue detect different flavors. So the front of your tongue picks up salt, the sides pick up sweetness and the back picks up bitterness.

The reception from the American Cheese Society was overwhelming. We were really excited to be invited to speak to such a die-hard group of cheese (and chocolate) lovers and the chocolate cheese pairings went amazingly well.

If you are doing a chocolate tasting we’d suggest looking at our guide on how to taste chocolate.