Marc De Champagne Truffles

No 1 husband, well let's be exact, my only husband, kindly purchased some champagne truffles from Marks and Spencer for me to review tonight. Alarm bells ringing. What has he done now?! Allegedly, nothing, it seems he's just being generous in his old age. Apparently, he decided not to buy them in London in case they were damaged before photos could be taken. Which is good thinking but strangely enough the price in Chelmsford's M&S store was more expensive than in Moorgate, London. Shock, horror!

Marc De Champagne Truffles

Packaging: Marks and Spencer you've spoiled us! An attractive looking box with the truffles held in a clear cello bag. Brown tissue paper ensures there is not too much movement in the box. The design for the packaging is reminiscent to their chocolate bars that I featured a few months ago. Well done to the marketing team for keeping the costs down and saving themselves a lot of stress and sleepless nights over the design. Show some imagination please! 

The Chocolate: A milk chocolate with a 31% cocoa content has been used to make these little babies. Ingredients include: sugar' dried whole milk, cocoa butter, cocoa mass, glucose syrup, invert sugar syrup, Marc de Champagne, Brandy and preservative E200. Hence why the shelf life is almost forever, well to be precise, 17/01/2012. For those of you new to chocolate, Marc de Champagne, is a colourless brandy that is produced by distilling the grape skins, seeds and stalks which are left from the pressing process at the first stage of champagne making. 


There is a thick coating of icing sugar over each of the truffles and the aroma is a mixture of brandy and sweet milk chocolate. The outer casing of chocolate is very sweet and there is not a lot of cocoa evident. The ganache centre is soft and sweet with a strong brandy taste as you'd expect. For me there is probably too much icing sugar as it makes the whole thing very sweet and slightly astringent on the back of my throat. However, the Marc de champagne is good and I like the overall mouth feel.


These are reasonable truffles even though they have a shelf life higher than some forms of radiation! There is also far too much sugar for my liking and cocoa content is a bit low. However, when you consider the price at £5.25 for 10 truffles/145g they are excellent value for money. Overall 6/10 for price and flavour. And by the way M&S you owe me 25p! Explain the price difference please!


An alternative - Traditional Marc de Champagne Truffles from Charbonnel et Walker are priced at £11.75 for 8 truffles/135g.