Vivani Ganznuss

I was strolling through my local Foodland store a few days ago looking for Smoked Salmon (as you do), when I stumbled across a few different kinds of Vivani chocolate (as you do, too).

I don’t normally associate Germany with being a big chocolate-making country – that’s for the Swiss, Belgians, etc, so I thought this would be something interesting to try. Translated, it just means Whole Milk Hazelnut. Instead of the usual nice picture on the outside telling lies, this has a cutout in the packaging so that you can actually see that, yes, it really does actually have nuts in. And you can see the colour of the chocolate. Nice touch.

For those into Organic food – this should tick all the boxes – all of the ingredients are certified organic. This does push the price up a bit though, at around $5 for 100 grams, this is not a cheap treat. Nevertheless, I took this one along to a quiz night. The chocolate was deemed very pleasant, and VERY nutty. This was however, by the time we’d supped on cheese and consumed rather a lot of red wine. The gathered opinions of the tasting panel might therefore be considered a little suspect. Out of fairness, I tried the little that was left, properly, a few days later when sobriety was regained.

The original opinions were pretty much bang on the money: the chocolate is quite soft, and represents a very rich, quite sweet, creamy well-made milk chocolate. The nuts are crunchy, and there are a lot of them. Unlike some hazelnuts, these actually have a decent hazelnut flavour as well. I’m a dark-side dweller, not much favouring a milk-chocolate, but I have to confess that this one is rather more-ish. And being one of those European exports with German, English, French and Italian on the back, you can probably find this through about half the world from the more specialised organic food suppliers.

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