Xocolat Amante - Indulge in the Origins of Chocolate

About Us

Chocolate is chocolate, right?

Or so I thought. It seems the commoditisation of products across the globe might be best illustrated by the plight of the humble chocolate bar.

Growing up I was always intrigued about how to make a chocolate bar, the individual ingredients that make up most food products and the process used to make them is usually fairly obvious. To make a cake you combine flour, butter, milk, eggs and other ingredients to give it flavour, beat it and cook it in an oven. To make icecream you combine cream, milk, sugar and flavours, freeze and beat the mixture to slightly aerate it.

It seemed a logical progression to a young boy that making a chocolate bar should be a similarly simple process. So I figured it should contain powdered cocoa, sugar, butter, milk and maybe something to make it set? All I got was an unappetizing slodge of powdered cocoa.

I’m a bit older and wiser now (or so I like to think anyway) and I understand that chocolate is made primarily from the Cacao bean by a complicated mechanized process to separate its individual parts and then recombine them into the form we all know and love. Yet I never gave any thought to the types of Cacao beans or the locations in which they were grown and whether this would influence the end product that I have had the pleasure to experience. It always seemed that no matter where you went chocolates were pretty similar, similar brands, similar flavours, and similar textures. The differences could be explained away by different flavourings added to the chocolate like vanilla, cinnamon or hazelnut or methods of production like the addition of milk powder, rather than actual variations in the raw Cacao beans. Even trying the hand made chocolates of artisanal chocolatiers produced fairly uniform results in regard to the actual flavour of the chocolate.

When I first found out that you could buy chocolates made from a single variety of cacao or grown in a single location I was certainly intrigued. A healthy interest in wine had already cultivated understanding of the subtleties of growing location or ‘terroir’ as they say in the wine world. Could chocolate really be that different? All I had really been exposed to in Australia was Cadburys, Nestle, Toblerone and Lindt. Oh, and the myriad of lovely little hand made chocolates or the nasty easter eggs that appear around March each year.

As well as bringing your attention to the interesting array of flavours that the world of fine or flavour chocolates offer, the inspiration for this site is the knowledge that fine or flavour cacao make up only 5% of the total market worldwide. It seems that many areas of fine or flavour cacao are converting to more profitable forms of land use. Rather than tell the landowners how to use their land, we encourage you to purchase the fine or flavour chocolates we list on this site in our Chocolate Shop. By stimulating demand we hope to help secure the heritage of chocolate for all. We will endeavour to list as many of the world’s best chocolates as possible and include the information that allows you to understand their composition, history and characteristics with the intention of enhancing your chocolate experience.

Why are we called Xocolat Amante?

It is widely quoted that Xocolatl is the Aztec word for the beverage they made from ground cacao beans, the precursor to modern day chocolate. ‘Xoco’ roughly translates to mean ‘bitter’ and ‘atl’ translates as ‘water’. It seems that bitter water was an accurate description of the drink made by the Aztecs on the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors as the Aztecs did not sweeten the mixture with sugar.

We have chosen the name Xocolat Amante as it combines the Aztec word for chocolate with the Spanish word for lover, Amante. We think this is appropriate as we sincerely hope that those who gain the most enjoyment from our site will indeed be lovers of chocolate. Importantly this name also provides a link to the two cultures that had the greatest influence in distributing the wonderful experience of chocolate to grateful consumers all around the world.

Why Xocolat Amante?

We love chocolate and hope you do too. We are hoping to provide others who love chocolate the opportunity to experience the best, most exclusive and most interesting chocolates.

We provide a library of information to help you make an informed decision about purchasing chocolate, designed to be accessible to anyone not just those 'in the know'.

We specialise in chocolate, this means we provide optimum storage and handling conditions for your premium product.

We are Australian and bound by Australian trade practices and consumer protection laws.