Even when I'm not blogging regularly, it is very rare not to have chocolate in the house. I found myself in that unpleasant situation just a few weeks ago, so I went to the nearest drugstore to restock. It was like going grocery shopping while hungry - I came home with 4 chocolate bars and a bag of Twizzlers Pull 'N' Peel. In any case, I had never tried this Ghirardelli bar before, so it was one of the lucky bars that came home with me.
I couldn't find any specific information on the cocoa content of this bar, but it was marked Intense Dark. Semi-sweet chocolate was listed as the first ingredient, but that's as far as the information on the package went. For a bar to be called Intense Dark, I would expect a minimum of 70% cocoa, but this bar was actually pretty light.
All of the flavors in this bar comes from extracts, and the chocolate was smooth, uniform, and very pretty. I didn't really sense a wine flavor from this bar (maybe I wasn't supposed to) - it reminded me more of grape fruit snacks. The bar was fairly soft for dark chocolate rather than snappy. All of the flavors were mellow and mild - I guess that's the "matinee" part of the bar - but I didn't love the combination.
Nothing stuck out about the cocoa. It wasn't milky or sweet, but it also wasn't bitter, nor did it have much of a fruity flavor outside of the tart and juice coctail-like flavor from the grapes. I couldn't taste much in the way of blackberry, maybe just a hint on the finish. It was pretty basic and boring. Not bad, but not particularly dark or intense. My husband enjoyed this bar much more than I did, but he likes lighter chocolate than I do.
Here's another take on this bar from ZOMG, Candy.
B-
