Regular readers of chocophile.com know that I don’t shy away from controversy around here and we’ve taken on several of the sacred cows of chocolate in the past couple of years.

Now it’s time for another, perhaps controversial, comparison: is European chocolate always better than American? Not everything is as it seems.

In another article I talked about how meaningless the phrase “single origin” is when applied to chocolate because there are no organizations governing the use of the names. Anybody is free to get beans from somewhere and call them whatever they want. Thus we should consider using the phrase “named origin” (or AO in French - appellation d’origine) without the “c” for controlled.

A case in point is Chuao, a semi-legendary growing region along the northern central coast of Venezuela (closer to Lake Maracaibo than to Trinidad). Once a major source of some of the very highest quality beans, commercial production has dwindled signifcantly—to the extent that some contend that it would be next to impossible to make commercially viable quantities of chocolate using beans sourced from Chuao.

Nonetheless, there are at least two - if not three - Chuao bars in production and I had the chance to taste two of them: one from Valrhona (65%) and the other from Amedei (70%).