Author: jean komatsu
Last saved by: ENU

Alegio Chocolate Tasting
1511 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, CA (Walnut Square area)
(also at: 11 Maiden Lane, SF. A new store in Palo Alto is opening April 2013, 522 Bryant St., Palo Alto, CA 94301)
http://www.alegio.com/home.html  
Review date: July 2012

Alegio Chocolates are among the most unique chocolates in the world, and Berkeley is one of only four retail locations where they are sold. This is chocolate made by an Italian with a compulsive/obsessive streak a mile wide and as long as the Nile River. It's an appropriate metaphor, since Claudio Corallo grows the cacao beans for his chocolates on a once-deserted island off the coast of Africa.

Making a long (and interesting) story short, these cacao beans are not the high-yield, genetically improved, carefully cultivated varieties found elsewhere. This is a variety of cacao bean almost two hundred years old that very nearly went extinct, which Corallo is trying to preserve. 

Because he's seriously OCD, he and his modest workforce care for the trees in the wild, harvest the small crop, clean, cull the beans (half the harvest won't meet his standards and are sold, to be snapped up immediately by other artisanal chocolatiers), roast them (his wife is the master roaster), de-germ them (see below), and then process the remaining beans into chocolates that don't resemble anything you've ever tasted before.

Corallo insists that the germ of every bean he keeps, must be removed before processing. He believes it makes the chocolate bitter, in the same way that a green sprout will make a garlic clove bitter if not removed (as Cook's Illustrated magazine indeed verified with their own garlic testing). So workers sit around laboriously removing the small cacao germ – it looks like the tiny, skinny stem that connects a single grape to the main branch – out of every bean.

The tasting starts with a photo slideshow, narrated by whoever is working the sales counter in their tiny shop, located inside an indoor mall and all the way at the back. There's constant noise from the surrounding vendors with only a very small area in which to stand/sit (four is a crowd and six would be close to impossible), but it's all quite interesting.

They quickly get to the star attraction, which is tasting the chocolate. This is so not Hershey, or Nestle's, or any brand of artisanal chocolate you have ever had. It starts off with a 100% cacao blend, meaning no sugar, salt, vanilla, lecithin, or anything else – just roasted, ground chocolate and water, tempered but not conched. 

This chocolate has a unique, earthy, almost musty taste. Not unpleasantly musty, but in a way that reminds you of how wine grapes will reflect their soil, what is called terroir. It's a heavy, weighty flavor, not ponderous but almost overwhelmingly intense in character.

The next chocolate to taste is an 80% blend. Still no vanilla, salt, or lecithin, which Corallo believes only mask the true taste and texture of a fine chocolate. This small addition of sugar makes the chocolate much more approachable, but it still does not taste like any kind of high- content cacao chocolate we've ever had.

Next comes a 75% blend, made with Demerara-type sugar, large crystals that crunch as you eat the chocolate. It makes for a lively interplay of flavors in the mouth: some sweet, some not. 

After that is a 73.5% blend, but this time the sugar is evenly melted in with the chocolate. The difference in taste between this and the 75% is astonishing. It's even more of an education when you're given a taste of a high-quality competitor's chocolate to compare them against. Also a high-content cacao blend, but this has the familiar vanilla, salt and lecithin in it. Suddenly, you can immediately identify the strong flavor of vanilla, and how neutral/bland the chocolate tastes in comparison with the Corallo chocolate.

The price for these chocolates is close to breathtaking, even in our stratospheric Bay Area. And this is not casual chocolate, the type you'd pick up and nibble on while doing something. This is Serious Chocolate, chocolate with a gravitas that demands your full attention. I enjoyed the chocolate tasting and did buy a few bars, but honestly cannot say that we would buy this chocolate to enjoy daily...or even once a week.

Nonetheless, anyone who has ever enjoyed a piece of chocolate should take this tasting, if for no other reason than to learn what chocolate actually tastes like. It's eye opening and educational, and available here in our own backyard, waiting for us to take advantage of it.

Although the website is not very well done, the shop sells both Corallo's chocolate and also the artisanal Enric Rovira chocolates from Spain. Rovira offers truffles and various flavored chocolates, some of which are difficult to see in such a small crowded space. The website is useful for looking at the full list of Rovira's Bombolas collection; there's quite a few flavors I wish we had picked up and will have to go back to buy.

Alegio tasting and slideshow presentation: $30/per couple, about an hour or less.