Depetris Riccardo

Depetris Riccardo - Alternative Monviso – Macambo

75 g Alternative Thoebroma
Regular price $11.70 USD
Sale price $11.70 USD Regular price
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Ranked in the Top 100 Chocolates in the World.

Origin & Craftsmanship

This bar is part of Depetris Riccardo / Depetris…i Ciculaté's Cioccolato del Monviso line, made in Revello at the foot of Mount Monviso — a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Piedmont region of Italy. Rather than conventional Theobroma cacao, the Macambo is crafted from the beans of Theobroma Bicolor, a wild relative of cacao known across Amazonian civilisations as Pataxte or Macambo. Riccardo Depetris works bean-to-bar using artisanal systems that preserve the full character of these alternative seeds — a labour-intensive process for a raw material that sits almost entirely outside commercial chocolate production.

Flavor Profile

 Unlike conventional dark chocolate, the Macambo produces a distinctly beige-coloured bar with a flavour profile closer to dried fruit than to cocoa bitterness — creamy, enveloping, and rounded, with gentle nuttiness and a smooth finish. For experienced chocolate drinkers this is a genuinely different sensory experience: familiar enough to read as chocolate, alien enough to surprise.

Award & Recognition

The Alternative Monviso — Macambo earned Gold at the 2026 International Chocolate Awards (European Bean-to-Bar Competition) in the Alternative Cacao category, scoring 90.4 points — the highest gold in its category. Depetris also took Silver in the same category for his Cupuaçu bar (88.4), making him the standout maker in alternative cacao at ICA 2026.

Tasting & Pairing Guide

Allow the bar to melt slowly — the creaminess and dried-fruit character reveal themselves gradually rather than immediately. Pair with a lightly oxidised white wine (an off-dry Chenin Blanc or Pinot Gris) to echo the nuttiness, or with roasted almonds and dried apricot for a textural pairing that stays in the same flavour register. For coffee drinkers, a natural-process Ethiopian with low acidity is a particularly clean match.

Summary
The Alternative Monviso — Macambo is one of the rarest bars in the world — a gold-winning, artisan-crafted dark chocolate made not from Theobroma cacao but from its wild Amazonian cousin. Beige in colour, creamy in texture, and unlike anything in conventional chocolate, it's a bar for curious palates and serious collectors.

Vegan, Dairy-free
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Riccardo Depetris grew up inside a pastry workshop — his parents have been operating in confectionery in the Cuneo province of Piedmont for over four decades. That apprenticeship never really ended. He trained formally at hotel school, then spent years travelling through France, Spain, Germany and the United States absorbing new markets, techniques and flavour sensibilities before returning to Revello to run the historic Pasticceria Del Viale — Depetris i Ciculaté with his brother Mario.
Riccardo's craft is rooted in Piedmontese tradition: the region's famed hazelnuts, the peaches of Revello, the local herbs and mountain fruits that grow at the foot of Monviso. But his approach is anything but backward-looking. He was among the first Italian chocolatiers to work bean-to-bar at an artisan scale, believing that handcrafted processing at each stage best preserves the organoleptic character of exceptional cacao.
The Cioccolato del Monviso line was born out of a long research project — a tribute to Mount Monviso, the solitary limestone peak that rises above the Po Valley and is the defining symbol of Piedmont. Each bar in the range is a dialogue between the mountain's altitude and geography and the tropical origins of cacao.
The Viola Mirtillo — with its hand-picked local violets and wild blueberries — is that dialogue at its most precise: an entire alpine landscape, compressed into a single bar.
Riccardo is also a teacher at ICIF and multiple hotel institutes across Piedmont, a technical consultant to chocolate machinery manufacturer Selmi, and a multi-awarded competitor at the International Chocolate Awards, where his work has accumulated gold, silver and bronze medals across more than a decade of competition.

Theobroma Bicolor cocoa beans, sugar, natural cocoa butter, emulsifier: sunflower lecithin

Our chocolate makers proudly refrain from using any artificial stabilizers or preservatives in their products, making their creations more temperature-sensitive compared to other premium chocolates.

To ensure the optimal taste experience, it's advisable to store our chocolates in a cool, dry place where the temperature hovers between 16°C and 18°C. Please refrain from refrigerating our chocolates, as this may cause sugar crystallization due to increased humidity, altering their texture and flavor.

On the contrary, if stored in excessively high temperatures, cocoa butter may separate and form a white film on the chocolate's surface. This loss of cocoa butter can lead to the chocolate drying out and, consequently, a potential alteration in flavor. Your mindful storage practices will help preserve the integrity of our delectable chocolates.