Like wine and cheese, chocolate has terroir, a sense of the place it was grown.
Each bonbon or bar may carry unique flavors shaped by the soil, rainfall and temperature of the farm. But much of that flavor variation comes from wild microbes that spontaneously ferment cocoa beans after harvest, says David Gopaulchan, a plant geneticist at the University of Nottingham in England. Cocoa plants’ genetic makeup plays a role in chocolate’s taste, but “fermentation also is driving the flavor development, and I would even argue, has an even bigger impact on the flavor profile,” he says.
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