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Fine chocolate is like fine wine, as a high quality blend is made with the same attention to detail as a vintage drop.

It has depth, it has complexity, it has vanilla undertones and bright top notes and some sourpuss nutritionists describe it as a nutritional disaster.

We are, of course, talking chocolate, real chocolate. Not just your average corner store fruit-and-nut bar but the kind of chocolate that people use the words for they normally reserve for discussing their Cabernet Sauvignons or Chardonnay's.

This is the sort of chocolate that makes you see why it was known as the food of the gods.

It is easy to understand the ancient belief that it was a sure-fire aphrodisiac and taste the fruits of a production process where the bean is picked, dried, roast, winnowed, ground, refined, pressed, 'conched' and then formed.

And if you haven't come across chocolate this good, stick around, it makes for an interesting story.

Bean There

Chocolate begins, like coffee, as a bean. Unlike the coffee bean, which first grew in Ethiopia, the cocoa bean was first cultivated by the Mayan People of Central America. They thought so much of their chocolate that when Cortez the Conquistador asked to see their treasures (early 16th century), they showed him a hill of beans: cocoa beans.

But the Mayans drank it. They called it 'cacau-atl' (a blend of crushed, roasted beans).

Cocoa beans are now sourced from all over the world: Bolivia, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Trinidad, Colombia, Ecuador, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Brasil, The Dominican Republic, Cuba, Venezuela, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, The Philippines and Malaysia. They are first fermented and then dried, before being sent to Belgium and all over the world.

 There are of course a variety of cocoa trees. The most popular trees are the 'Criollo' (mostly cultivated in Central America) and the 'Forastero'. 

The 'Criollo' tree produces the finest cocoa beans. However, the 'Forastero' is more often used on the larger plantations because of its resistance to diseases. These beans are in high demand to produce industrial but less refined cocoa.

Picking cocoa beans has always been labour intensive. The beans are picked by hand by the native people. A good picker collects about 1500 cocoa beans a day.

Done That

The fermentation happens within 24 hours of the 'ecabossage' usually on the plantation and takes about 5 to 7 days.

Once the beans arrive in Belgium they are roasted at around 140 degrees Celsius, then winnowed: the beans are cracked and the outer husks blown away. Next what are now known as cocoa 'nubs' are ground with a little water until they become cocoa mass: the most important ingredient to make good quality chocolate.

This process creates two products: cocoa butter and cocoa powder.

Cocoa powder (like tea powder) used to be a waste product. However, it has found a market. It is now widely used to make chocolate milk and imitation chocolate.

Since a couple of years the demand for cocoa powder has even outperformed the demand for cocoa butter. It seems a sign of the times that even with chocolate corporate profits often come before quality.

Before you get a high grade eating chocolate a second grinding is required to get the particle size down, the cocoa liquor is put into a 'conch', a machine named after the shape of the original model, shell shaped, which gives its name to the process of 'conching'.

Conching is a very important and time consuming process for turning cocoa mass into chocolate. In this process all the ingredients are mixed, stirred, ground, and blended.

For good chocolate, these ingredients will include cocoa liquor, added cocoa butter, beet sugar, a little lecithin to emulsify and some premium vanilla. To create milk chocolate a condensed full milk powder will be added. The longer the conching the better and glossier the end product becomes. However, its glossy shine disappears when you touch it or when humidity levels are high.

Once conched, the chocolate is tempered: a complicated process of raising and lowering the chocolate whilst it is being stirred, ensuring a smooth and even consistency.

Finally, as for that killjoy nutritionist at the start of the story, remember that the fat in chocolate, cocoa butter, has very little effect on your levels of LDL, the 'bad cholesterol'. As long as you eat good dark chocolate, you'll be fine.

Our chocolates are air freighted from Belgium to Sydney every few weeks.
And they are only a few mouse clicks away, no matter where you live.