Impact
Lasting will & testament to how much this once-royal Nacional Cocoa King now needs the Sugar Queen... lest it becomes Charles without Diana.
Appearance 2.3 / 5
another homeless orphan from Plantations
another homeless orphan from Plantations
| Color: | murky brown |
| Surface: | raw slab |
| Temper: | listless anti-sheen... dull & dead |
| Snap: | ahhh, always Plantations’ saving grace note but this one verges on brittle & bloom; jagged edge |
Aroma 5.9 / 10
1st real sign of chocolate in the entire line... cut by citrus nance (incl its cheese funk in the seed trunk) & dried ‘n fried cinnamon-coffee; aerates greens / grains + a florid soap bubble
Mouthfeel 11.4 / 15
| Texture: | lumps & clumps... |
| Melt: | ... liquifies |
Flavor 36.7 / 50
bursts the floral chocolate bubble -> raisin disguised as dried blackberry -> simmering coffee never boils over & stays mocha -> eucalyptus mint -> chocolate chalk -> astringent banana peel
Quality 16.2 / 20
Demos just how much sugar modulates the transformation of this line-up’s green profile & alters the progression, sweetening a lot of ills that plague the label. Still, a rather cold & stark bar, even if the most palatable of Plantations' Dark offerings, presenting one of the few truly vertical-tasting catalogs in all of chocolate, spanning the range... from Milk to Semi-Dark & Dark, all the way up to Brut... of a single-origin estate - Rancho San Jacintho, Ecuador (another vertical catalog, also from the same country, is Coppeneur’s Iara Estate portfolio).
Overall, the anatomy of this quartet of Dark bars (100 – 90 – 75 - 65) is quite youthful, for this year's vintage at least. An underfermented cycle ('cacáo verde') biases the results, creating all those undeveloped ‘green’ notes, exacerbated by substandard processing. Also apparent, the degree to which severe hybridization among traditional Nacional tree stands (essentially Ecuador’s ‘criollo’) has been infiltrated by clonal CCN-51, thanks to the connection between Tulicorp & Ecucocoa (the processor of these Plantations bars) & the Crespo family (largely responsibile for making CCN-51 the most widely planted hybrid there). The net is that all those glorious Ecuador chocolates of yore - highlighted by jasmine, geranium, blackberry & strawberry - are in decline, an endangered memory, replaced by an inferior subclone & ever-greater marketing hype surrounding ‘Arriba’ – another casualty of the modern cacáo industry.
ING: cacáo mass, raw sugarcane, soy lecithin; CBS - roughly even thirds
Overall, the anatomy of this quartet of Dark bars (100 – 90 – 75 - 65) is quite youthful, for this year's vintage at least. An underfermented cycle ('cacáo verde') biases the results, creating all those undeveloped ‘green’ notes, exacerbated by substandard processing. Also apparent, the degree to which severe hybridization among traditional Nacional tree stands (essentially Ecuador’s ‘criollo’) has been infiltrated by clonal CCN-51, thanks to the connection between Tulicorp & Ecucocoa (the processor of these Plantations bars) & the Crespo family (largely responsibile for making CCN-51 the most widely planted hybrid there). The net is that all those glorious Ecuador chocolates of yore - highlighted by jasmine, geranium, blackberry & strawberry - are in decline, an endangered memory, replaced by an inferior subclone & ever-greater marketing hype surrounding ‘Arriba’ – another casualty of the modern cacáo industry.
ING: cacáo mass, raw sugarcane, soy lecithin; CBS - roughly even thirds