The dark fantasy of a chocolate connoisseur

What should you look for in a luxury chocolate? Like good wine, the chocolate should interpret the flavour of the bean

The first thing you need to remember about chocolate is that there are two quite distinct categories of product that go by that name. The first includes the mass-market, industrial chocolates we grew up on: the Cadbury’s, the Snickers, the Mars bars, the Kit-Kats, etc. And the second is high-end chocolate crafted by skilled chocolatiers, derived from high-end beans and usually, made by a different process than the industrial stuff.

Though chocolate has been around for millennia, milk chocolate, oddly enough, is of relatively recent origin(Getty Images)

Different regions can produce beans that taste significantly different. Chocolate from Chuao in Venezuela, for instance, is better than chocolate from anywhere else in that country (AFP)

In 2007, Yogi Deveshwar, ITC’s long-time chairman, decided that he wanted the company to make world-class chocolates

The Fabelle line of chocolates is sourced from several different countries, conched for at least 12 hours and then hand-crafted