Bonnat Apotequil

It’s been a while since I’ve had any Bonnat chocolate, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from this bar. It’s been in my collection for a while and I thought it was about time I scoffed sampled it.

It’s a hefty 100g bar, but perhaps the reason it has gone ignored in my stash for so long is Bonnat’s slightly old fashioned packaging. Inside there may be a bean to bar chocolate made with fine beans, but the thin paper sleeve and foil paper inner wrapper don’t shout quality to me. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by the wonderfully enticing packaging on modern bean to bar chocolate wrappers like the Marou range, but first impressions really do count.

Bonnat Apotequil claims to be made from a rare Porcelana variety of beans from Peru, but people I’ve spoken to suggest that it may not strictly be a Porcelana bean. My cacao genetics is a bit rusty, so I have to take the claims at face value.

Unwrapped, the chocolate has a rich, dark and glossy appearance, divded into small chunks, not unlike a Green & Black’s bar. You can tell from the moment you pick it up that it’s high in cocoa butter as it feels glossy in the hand.

That added cocoa butter has a big impact on the flavour of this bar – or at least how the flavour develops. Because it takes a few seconds to melt, first thing you get when you pop a chunk in your mouth is… nothing. There’s an incredibly smooth, buttery texture but it takes several seconds for any flavour to come through.

When the flavour does arrive, it’s sweet but not particularly complex. There’s a fruitiness to it, moving towards slightly citrus notes, but I find myself wondering if it was actually worth the wait. It’s pleasant, but it’s not a chocolate I would go out of my way for.

My opinion of this chocolate is strongly influenced by the cocoa butter content. There are bars such as Pralus Le 100 where I love the texture a little more added cocoa butter provides, but in this case it doesn’t work for me.

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