Espresso, red wine, and chocolate — a delightful combination. With Valentine's Day upon us, I thought I would take a tour of some of the best Chocolatiers in the world via their Websites.

My goal — to create a Pinterest board aggregating their delightful offerings.

The most challenging part of the task was to find visually delicious product photographs large enough to pin. The collection took me more than two hours to research and pin, partly due to small or no images and only flash sites.

Larger images and stronger descriptions would have made the products pop more. Now that people are more used to searching images, good and well tagged photography is a big draw.

If you look closely enough at the images I chose for the Valentine's Day chocolate board, you will see the artistry and detail. Those are all images I found on the various Chocolatiers Websites and on a couple of aggregator sites when there were no images at all on the sites.

Richart, Recchiuti, Payard, Romanicos chocolates all are delicately adorned, yet I can hardly see the artistry. The Amedei box is so small I can only imagine the pralines. I found the Marcolini image for the post by searching images instead of their Website.

Compare the two dozen images I found to the photographs created by food bloggers and selected the community to pin on Pinterest, and the many more you see on food blogs every day and you see how Chocolatiers are missing an opportunity to showcase their best creations.

Here's an example of images people pinned for Marcolini chocolate and those for La Meison du Chocolat.

Thanks to the use of phone cameras, easy to create blogs and sites, and visual networks like Instagram and Pinterest, customer conversations are changing. Search and share may well include images from your store window or display — real and digital.

What better way to showcase your product than on the window created by a customer for their friends.

[Pierre Marcolini, Brussels]