Let me get the awkward part out of the way. The single highest-scoring bar of the 2026 European Bean-to-Bar competition — higher than every dark bar, every heroic 100% slab, every serious-faced single origin in the room — is a white chocolate with flowers in it.

I know. I had feelings about it too.

White chocolate, as a rule, is what happens when someone removes everything interesting from chocolate and sells you the remainder. It is the participation trophy of the confectionery world. So when the Depetris Monviso Purple Blueberry came back from the judges with 94.2 points — Gold, a Special Prize for Local Ingredients, and a Special for Eclectic Flavours, the top score of the entire competition — my first assumption was that the judges had been got at. Bribed. Possibly hypnotised.

Then I ate it, and had to write an apology to white chocolate.

What Riccardo did

The man responsible is Riccardo Depetris, who works at the foot of Mount Monviso in Revello, Piedmont — a solitary limestone peak that the locals call the King of Stone, which tells you something about the temperament of the region. Riccardo grew up in his family's pastry workshop and never really left; he trained across France, Spain, Germany and the United States, then came home to make chocolate bean-to-bar at a scale most people would call financially unwise.

The trick — and it is a genuine trick — is the base. Ordinary white chocolate is built on deodorised cocoa butter, which is a polite way of saying its personality has been surgically removed. Riccardo builds his on raw cocoa butter and cane sugar, which keeps the personality intact: a warmer colour, a rounder body, something almost savoury underneath the sweetness. It does not taste like the white chocolate of your childhood disappointments.

Into that he folds violets and blueberries, hand-picked from the Monviso foothills. Not flavourings. Not a bottle labelled "violet essence, artificial." Actual alpine flowers and actual local fruit, in season, from the mountain the bar is named after. You get floral notes on top, a brightness of real fruit through the middle, and a creamy round finish that lingers longer than it has any right to.

It is, essentially, an entire Piedmontese mountainside that someone has folded into a 75-gram bar. I did not think white chocolate could be a landscape. I stand corrected, publicly, in writing.

How to eat it

One instruction, and it matters: let it come to room temperature first. Cold, the violet stays folded up and shy. Warm, it opens — florals, then berry, then that savoury cocoa-butter depth underneath. Rushing it is like watching a film from the second act. Give it ten minutes out of the wrapper.

If you want to make an occasion of it: a light sparkling rosé alongside, or — since we're deep in reserve-and-wait season and you may not fancy wine at eleven in the morning — a hibiscus tea, which echoes the floral register beautifully. For contrast, fresh ricotta and a thread of honey. The ricotta lifts the cocoa butter; the honey bridges the fruit and the flower.

One note on getting it to you in one piece

This bar is built on raw cocoa butter and nothing artificial, which is exactly why it tastes alive — and also exactly why it doesn't enjoy a hot delivery van. Chocolate that overheats in transit sets back badly: it blooms, that pale chalky film creeps across the surface, and the whole careful thing arrives muffled. (If you've ever wondered why a bar turns white, we wrote the whole sad science of it here.)

So for the warm months, the sensible move is to reserve now and let it ship from September, when the weather cooperates and it can travel the way Riccardo intended. It's the difference between tasting the bar and tasting a rumour of the bar.

The point

This is the first of a bar a week, all summer — and I wanted to open with the one that most thoroughly embarrassed my assumptions. The best chocolate in the world this year is white, Italian, floral, and made by a man who picks the flowers himself. If that isn't worth reserving, I don't know what is.

Reserve the Monviso →

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