Building a chocolate tasting vocabulary

Trying to identify blackcurrant is a losing first move. Start with ten broad families — fruity, floral, nutty, caramel, earthy, spicy, roasted, bitter, sweet, acidic — and place what you taste into one of them.

Specificity comes later and comes from repetition. A taster who can reliably say fruity is more useful than one who guesses blackcurrant and is wrong.

Bitter and astringent: bitterness is a taste that fades, astringency is a dry rough sensation that builds. Acidic and sour: acidity is bright and integrated, sourness is sharp and separate. Smoke and burnt: smoke is hammy and comes from drying, burnt is ashy and comes from roasting. Musty and mushroom: musty is a storage defect, mushroom can be a genuine earthy note.

Getting these four right transforms a vague complaint into a diagnosis, and they are the highest-value vocabulary on the site.

Beyond flavour, describe the shape of the experience. Attack is what arrives first. Length or finish is how long it lasts. Balance is whether any element dominates. Body is the weight in the mouth.

These are often more informative than flavour notes, because they are easier to agree on. Two people may disagree about whether a bar tastes of raisin and agree entirely that it has a long finish.

The single most effective practice is writing something for every bar, however crude. Bright, flat, sour, smooth, long — five words is enough.

Over twenty bars a pattern emerges that no amount of reading produces, and you discover your own preferences are more specific than you thought. Scoring out of ten adds nothing; the words are what carry the information.