TheChocolateLife :: LIVE – Learning to Taste (Chocolate)

Join me for this ChocolateLife :: LIVE live stream during which I will be setting a foundation for discussions central to many future live streams by talking about the evolution of my education learning to taste chocolate – professionally – over the past 25 years.

I will discuss where I started out, some of the steps I went through, where I am today, and some of the challenges I see with how tasting,and especially chocolate tasting, is taught today.

In general, there are two processes to learn to taste, with one of them dominating over the other. I refer to these two processes as Descriptive versus Comparative.

There are many approaches to learning to taste chocolate from a Descriptivist perspective. All of them based in whole or in part on convention/tradition, born out of the educational systems used to train professionals, prosumers, and plain old consumers how to taste wine.

But is the Descriptivist approach the best (or even a better) approach? It depends upon the needs of the student – their goals and plans to use their education.

Descriptivist Tasting Education

These are three different ways of visualizing the same lexicon (vocabulary); the featured image at the top of the page is a fourth. Not only do we have to decide on which visualization to use we need to decide what shared vocabulary to use. This exists in coffee in the form of the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) flavor wheel. There is no such consensus vocabulary and visualization in chocolate.

Comparative Tasting Education

An in-depth explanation of learning to taste using the Comparative approach will be the subject of my next book, Discovering Chocolate, which I plan to release as serialized chapters in eBook form before publishing a compilation in print.

This live stream will introduce the foundations of the Comparative approach, its primary goals and methods, and advocate for its wider adoption given my contention it is a better fit for the vast majority of consumers.

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