As delicious as Lindt chocolates are, they are definitively not fair trade.  This raises a lot of ethical questions and objections from me, but I did end up buying the chocolate, didn't I?  What can I say; it was on sale.  Apparently my ethical objections go out the window in the face of an orange "50% Off"  card.  Sad but true.

I have been wanting to try this salted chocolate for ages, but had never gotten around to it.  Having tried it, I'm embarrassed to admit that my primary, overarching reaction is, "it made me really thirsty."  I mean, duh, right?  IT'S SALTY.  But it made me thirstier than the negligible overall salt content can account for.  I don't really know how to explain it.  Sometimes sugary things make me salty, though.  (Ice cream always sends me gasping for my faucet mounted water filter.)

Despite the huge popularity of salted sweet things in recent years, I remain on the fence about salt and chocolate as a flavor combination.  (Although believe it or not, you can make a severely delicious dessert using Saltines, butter, brown sugar, and chocolate chips.)

Before I unwrapped it, I was afraid that the bar would be covered with a salty coating, like Fritos or something.  Fortunately I found that in this case, the salt is confined to a few little nuggets of salt - excuse me, "flowers" of salt - which are sprinkled through the bar.  

This results in a somewhat disconcerting experience where, as you're nibbling your chocolate bar, you taste "chocolate… chocolate… chocolate… SALT… chocolate… chocolate…"  The salt taste seems to be very confined to the salt crystals, making the salty taste a very distinct and sharp change.  It hasn't made the rest of the chocolate salty, and how they managed that trick I can't imagine.

The best I can say about this bar is, I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it either.  I ate half the bar and wrapped the rest up for later.  That's unprecedented; I usually either snarf the entire thing in a single sitting, or take one bite and throw the rest away.

One thing I definitely didn't care for is the aftertaste.  Instead of leaving the taste of chocolate, it leaves behind the taste of… salt.  I'm not that big a salt fan, to appreciate an aftertaste of salt.  In the end I found myself quaffing a Coke Zero to rid myself of the taste.  (And because I was THIRSTY.)

This is a 47% bar, which is on the lighter side of "dark."  This only reinforces my suspicion that the Excellence flavor line is aimed at the chocolate amateurs.  The people who want a dark chocolate (perhaps because of the health benefits of the flavinols in dark chocolate) but who are frightened of this thing called "dark chocolate."  

I guess that makes this line the Boone's Farm Flavored Wine Coolers of chocolate.  Which seems about right, considering the overbearing "fruity" flavors found in that delightfully juvenile delinquent beverage.