The first thing you may notice about the chocolate bars made by Spinnaker, a Seattle-based chocolate maker, is that they are typically about $11, sometimes more, for two ounces of chocolate. Cue the complaints about inflation and everything costing too much in Seattle. It’s undeniable that Spinnaker, like many other fancy chocolate producers, sells expensive stuff — their bars aren’t everyday purchases for most people, and some people don’t have enough money to ever contemplate spending that much on a treat.
But my eyes were open to that price tag being worth it a few years ago, when I visited Spinnaker’s old factory in Bryant a few years ago. “Factory” may be the wrong word, since it was a single room where brothers Kelly and Chris Van Arsdale and their team used some custom-made equipment to shell and sort cacao nibs before roasting them and turning them into chocolate. But the small business had already been racking up the awards and accolades, so I was writing about it for Eater to see what all the fuss was about.
Spinnaker, like many small, artisanal chocolate companies, makes “single-origin” chocolate, in which all the cacao in a given product comes from the same place — it’s similar to single-origin coffee, where all the beans in a bag originated from the same country. And just as an Ethiopian coffee tastes different from Costa Rican coffee, chocolate hailing from Uganda has a different flavor profile from chocolate from Belize.
Spinnaker recently moved its production facility to Stone Way in Wallingford, where members of the public can tour the factory or sit and have some drinking chocolate in the cafe. But the star attraction there may be the tables in the front where there are free samples of the chocolate alongside descriptions of tasting notes. If you try one varietal of chocolate after another, it’s a magic trick: The bar made from cacao from Belize (a big award-winner for Spinnaker) has some dark berry sweetness to it, while the Tanzanian chocolate has a mellower, mango-esque aftertaste. I didn’t get any of the lemon zest notes that the Indian bar supposedly had (blame my palate), but I did get honey. If you’re accustomed to eating chocolate that is flavored by adding other elements to it — mint or caramel or fruit — this is a revelation. Just like wine tastes different depending on where the grapes come from, chocolate gets its flavors from the cacao. Instead of drowning out the cacao’s characteristics by adding other stuff to the chocolate, producers like Spinnaker highlight the sometimes subtle, delicate distinctions between regions.
Just like not everyone cares about wine, not everyone is going to care about chocolate. But single-origin chocolate makers have been quietly making the case that chocolate deserves the same kind of respect we give wine — chocolate doesn’t have to be an affordable jolt of sugar, something you cram in between marshmallow and graham cracker. It can be a luxury, something you savor and focus on, something that opens your eyes.
