A 45g dark chocolate with peppermint bar here from Italian chocolate manufacturers Venchi. Established over 120 years ago in the Piedmont Alps, Venchi use local products and traditional recipes to create deep flavoured, high quality chocolate, packaged with a classic, Italian style. Venchi use natural vanilla, almond oil and their local Piedmont hazelnuts with none of the bad stuff. Well they sound good, but then again so did our Spanish floor tile artisan, Enric Rovira.

First impressions of the bar are good. The dark chocolate is 60% cocoa solids, it looks very small but at 45g it’s…well, small, so yeah. Dark chocolate and peppermint is a classic combo, something that’s hard to get wrong really. I only got this bar because it was on special offer, and it’s hopefully worth the 99p I paid, as opposed to its £1.95 RRP.

Hardly any ingredients is always a good thing, there are no hazelnuts in this bar, sadly, but there we go. Nice, plain packaging, the image on the front is of a bunch of mint leaves with a square of their chocolate, the classic style of art mentioned. They have a seal there, and mention that they were established in 1878. Opening the wrapper reveals gold foil, good quality stuff.

And inside the wrapper is our bar. No cracks, no scrapes, the bar is dark and slightly glossy with a good polished finish. The overside shows this bar has many tiny chunks, 18 of them in fact, which is a lot considering the size and weight of this bar, each piece measuring about the size of the fingernail of my index finger.

The bar has a nice smell to it, an even distribution of mint and chocolate. I cracked a section off, the bar made a satisfying, crisp sound, it’s all good so far. In goes a piece, the flavour is again very well balanced, the dark chocolate has its distinct flavour, the peppermint comes through, happy to sit in the background for the most part. The bar isn’t too bitter or too sweet, it’s just about right. I’m thoroughly impressed by it, there’s no cream or fondant, it’s peppermint oil mixed in with the dark chocolate, and it just tastes really good, I can’t fault what they’ve done here at all.

Overall, Venchi have left a great impression on me. They have a good history, good local sourcing and ingredients, the packaging is good, the bar is great, what more can I say? I’ll definitely have to check out the rest of their range and I recommend you do the same. Mint chocolate fans rejoice, this is how it’s done.