DARS Chocolate – Fragrant Muscat

As part of my haul in my travels, I chanced upon DARS in what appeared to be a limited flavour, and my tiny collector brain lit up like a Christmas tree. And so here we are…

Unlike the fragrant strawberry flavour, this one seems much more novel to me. Probably on account of muscat or grape not being used as much as a flavour of chocolate. While I did enjoy the fragrant strawberry version of this release, it was also a safe flavour to try since it’s so much more common, and well established. Not that muscat and chocolate is a new or novel concept, but it isn’t as prevalent on this side of the hemisphere. I guess part of it is how uncommon muscat is here, so many may be lead to believe that its an artificial grape and that grapes don’t actually taste that way. In reality the table grapes we get here are mostly just water and sugar and don’t have a whole lot of flavour beyond that, so it’s understandable mistake.

The most striking thing is the smell of these. I feel like these smell more strongly of the muscat than the strawberry did. It has a very strong, distinct floral and sweet smell to it that is very enticing. At the same time, it also smells like a chewing muscat candy like Hi-Chew, while simultaneously also like lychee. My mind also wanders to those sweet aloe vera drinks that are soaked in what is essentially sugary grape juice.

The flavour is like putting a Hi-Chew in your mouth, but quickly realizing it’s actually chocolate and getting this buttery, sugary dairy flavour that quickly follows. It’s not too different from some of the grape flavoured caramel sweets I’ve had, but this one has a smoother finish as the white chocolate base is generally inoffensive.

The texture is a melty block of sugar and dairy, and is no different from a solid block of white chocolate. Well, with the slight exception for the inner layer that appears as a nice greenish hue – I’m not sure what they added but it also reminds me of the Umai-Chew line of Hi-Chews where they inject some sugar flavour crystals to give it a texture. Mind you there’s not much of that here, but it’s enough that you can sort of notice it’s not quite just a block of chocolate and they sprinkled a little something extra in there.

This is not bad at all, but would I consider this a suitable choice for a chocolate flavour? Maybe not in this exact format. I would get this again, but probably pay the premium that I did. This is definitely a flavour I would like to share with friends to see how they react though.