Askinosie Soconusco Origin Bar - 75% Cacao

Mexico, here we come! Perhaps my favorite country for beauty and people and smells and easy yet historically profound leisure (vying with Turkey and--technically not quite a country anymore--Corsica. This bar, just the second chocolate bar by Askinosie chocolate and possibly the first high-end chocolate out of Mexico since the revival of fine dark chocolate, rocks.

Like the San Jose Del Tambo, this bar is dried fruity, with a bit of fruity, and has much the same mouth feel, though a bit rougher around the edges. Similarly, the bar has deep, loamy earth notes that make you want to take up banana tree growing just so you can plunge a spade, again and again, into the unleashed tropical headiness of moist Mexican mulch. Simply put, buy this bar, eat some, eat a little more, then turn toward the southern border and smile.

In 1502, when Christopher Columbus became the first European to see cacao off the coast of Honduras and the island of Guanaga, the Soconusco region of Mexico near the Guatemalan border had a reputation for producing some of the finest cacao in the Aztec Empire. Today, the modern town of Soconusco is a sleepy little hamlet that is no longer a center of cacao production. In nearby towns, however, families farm cacao using tools and techniques that would have been recognizable to their ancestors, forging a link between the legendary Soconusco cacao of Aztec times and the chocolate we are making today.