Color:	copper brown w/ purple cast
Surface:	nearly ideal face; designer swale on the flipside
Temper:	powdered matte front; semi-gloss back
Snap:	tight & lyrical; finely granulated break

shades of Massa Pura: very clean & lean cocoa woods & oxidized tobacco leaf -> melonic convergence w/ coffee & strawberry-rose; parmesan on the rubdown

Texture:	medium weight w/ pockets of fat
Melt:	uneven but well-paced tempo

delicately infused chocolate from the underside of the aromatics, especially strawberry -> mamey sapote (its sweet yam components) churn cacáo butter... progression momentarily empties to a stall -> melon for days (kiwano [horned melon] & melocoton [cassabanana]) -> recessed vanilla comes fore -> gentle green cigar leaf for hazy bitterness -> reference-point chocolate-glory w/ a strawberry linger

Painterly. Really plays with the light while staying in its lane. The degree to which foreboding aromatics (particularly coffee) hardly end up foreshadowing the flavor set Vestri apart from most bar-smiths. Pervading darkness - from nocturnal chocolate to vanilla & tobacco - invested in the candlelight of sugar, softened thru butter, that does hollow some in the mid-palate only to straighten back up for a sensory finish.

And that’s just a crude sketch of the details making Vestri a variation on Caravaggio in subtle chocolate.


Still Life with Fruit, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1601-05

ING: cocoa mass, sugar, cacáo butter, vanilla, soya lecithin

Reviewed Summer 2009