A single-origin dark chocolate made with Ugandan cacao, from Meurisse — founded by Adolphe Meurisse in Antwerp in 1845, and the oldest Belgian chocolate house still in operation.
What single origin actually tells you
Most chocolate is blended, for the same reason most coffee and most whisky is: blending irons out the variation between harvests and gives a product that tastes the same every year. It is a legitimate craft, and it is also the opposite of what a single-origin bar is for.
A single-origin bar tastes of somewhere. Cacao picks up character from the variety of the tree, the soil, the climate and — above all — how the beans are fermented after picking, which is where most of chocolate's flavour is actually created. Two bars at the same percentage from different origins can taste startlingly unalike.
Uganda
Ugandan cacao, much of it from the west of the country, tends towards intensity: deep, fruity, with a pronounced acidity and a long finish. It is not a shy chocolate, and at a high percentage it is emphatically a bar for drinking coffee with rather than for eating a whole row of.
Meurisse
The house was re-established by Adolphe's great-great-great-grandchildren, working with single-origin, fair-trade, organic cacao. The packaging is plastic-free, with a home-compostable inner wrapper — which is rarer than it should be in confectionery.
Tasting it properly
Room temperature, one square, melted slowly on the tongue rather than chewed. A well-tempered chocolate melts cleanly at body temperature and the flavour arrives in stages — acidity first, then fruit, then the long bitter finish. Chewing collapses all of it into one impression.
Storage
Cool and dry, 15–18 °C, away from strong smells — cocoa butter absorbs them readily. Not the fridge. Check the pack for allergens.