Wine Pairing Story (13)

5-month-old goat cheese : a runny (front-left) and a dry-hard (right) Somewhere in the Loire in march
Another old goat cheese story. Winter is the high time for old goat cheese : as you may know, if natural cycles are respected, you don't get goat cheese in winter, the lactation time of the goats being from march to october (industrial-minded cheese factories use hormones to "de-season" the goats...). Thus this old-time tradition to keep goat cheese in cool places for winter consumption. Goat cheese, like other cheese, can stand actually a long affinage time, either being left maturing and drying slowly in a cool place, or kept in clay pots to keep some moisture. It is called then vieilli au pot (aged in pots). I bought these two different types of old goat cheese on a market in the Loire Valley for 1,8 Euro each. When I saw these leaf-wrapped things along with the others in their small crates, I knew I was bound for a good surprise. The cheese in the front on the pic is a runny 5-month-old goat cheese, wrapped in a plane-tree leaf and aged in a pot. The one in the background has the same age, but it is hard and dry. The third, on the left, is much younger but it has already the typical strong taste peculiar to this sort of cheese. I forgot to ask how many months old it was but I would say two months.I bought them on a market stand somewhere in the Loire to a farmer who has been making goat cheese for 40 years. The making of this cheese may be sanitary uncorrect for the sanitary enforcers and while this is not (yet) an isolated case, we'll not expose more about the whereabouts of this farm. You'll find mostly old people and small farm-producers who still make this sort of old goat cheese because its fabrication needs patience and because the sanitary rules enforced by the French administration and backed by the European Union don't encourage these authentic products.But, well, this sort of old goat-cheese is still made, sold and purchased throughout France and the country is still a cheese-lover paradise.

The goat stableI wanted to visit this goat-cheese farm because I understand that these artisanal productions are dwindling in numbers and progressively replaced by modern, spotless facilities. The old-time cheese farms are not really up to the last sanitary norms, and they are tolerated just because the owners are aging, the administration considering that it is just a matter of time before they close down.
This farm is a real farm as you can dream it, with a messy surrounding, its barn, hay stacks and barking dogs. The stable held only a portion of the goats it had maybe 20 years ago, but that is enough work, I guess.
Speaking of the rules imposed to cheese makers in France (but that's probably the same in much of the developped world), they seem to have been thought out by someone who doesn't know what cheese is about, like I have a hard time to understand why cheesemakers are obliged to have these immaculate, white tile walls. Bacteria is important for the cheese and if you deprive it from the natural bacteria environment of a place where cheese has been made for years, you will lose something. It's symptomatic that superbugs for example appeared precisely in the sterilized environment of modern hospitals, and I wonder if these super-clean new cheese factories are not potentially more dangerous for our health than these so-so looking rustic cheese farms. Who's that ?Is there a cuter farm animal than a goat ? you walk in the barn or the stable and here they come looking intensely at you, eyes wide open and full of curiosity. They are shy and move away if you come too close, but always come back for a glance at the stranger. The farm woman says that if there's someone they don't know near the milking stable, they will stay put and refuse to walk up the ladders. In the stable, they move with ease as the building could hold many more than today's maybe ten goats. There will be baby goats soon, I should come back for a few more pics [the pics of the cutest baby-goats around _below left_ were shot here two weeks later].
Not that I want to disturb this magic scene with my rants, but in the chapter of Administrative harassment against artisan-food producers, I found recently this ludicrous DDSV document specifically intended for the French artisan cheese-makers (petits établissements fermiers ou artisanaux). DDSV is an acronym for Direction Départementale des Services Vétérinaires, the French administration body in charge of checking (harassing ?) the farmers for everything related to farm animals, forcing them to change now and then their equipment for each of the new rules that they set up from their comfortable offices. If you understand French, you will probably laugh out loud at reading the questionnaire that the farmers are supposed to fill and send back to the fonctionnaires. This is something inbetween Kafka and Brazil (the movie), and I imagine the puzzled old farmers who have to face this... Where is the tall guy gone ?The cheese makers (fromagers) protest regularly but in vain against these EU-induced forced investments that they can't always afford, many making barely ends meet every month. Gathered somewhere in France a couple years ago, they formulated their anger and questions in very careful words, like this other document in French testifies. They express their hopes that small artisan producers will be allowed to keep their traditional cellars or brick walls and retain the traditional vegetal materials, wood or copper that they have been using for generations.
But in spite of this administrative obstruction, the raw-milk cheese can still call France its home, while many countries don't accept imports of raw-milk based products, like the United States and Japan (where there seems to be only one raw-milk farm) where raw-milk products are also looked upon as unsafe. Madeleine Vedel, an expat Seattleite who settled in Provence and is very active on the real-food front, wrote a very informative page (in English) on cheese in France and also about the EU and U.S. sanitary rules. While mostly based on the Provence cheese scene, her analysis paints a good picture of what is going on between the real-cheese makers and the hygiénistes from the French sanitary agencies and the European Union. She also writes (sorry for the American cheese lovers) that many cheeses from France never cross the Atlantic due to the fact that they are made from raw milk and then sold anywhere from the day of their fabrication to six weeks of age. They must content themselves with cheeses, both imported and domestically produced, that abide by the FDA’s cheese laws, which specify that cheese must either be made from pasteurized milk or aged at least 60 days. The Petit Solognot, a free Loire newspaper had a story last week about the Fromagerie Jacquin, a reference on the goat cheese market : it is said that this cheese company which makes manually 1000 metric tons of cheese yearly and exports 25% of its output, has to follow a separate production process for certain countries [like the US or Japan], using only pasteurized milk for these markets. What the article doesn't say is that this implies a loss in the way in terms of taste and quality that I'm not sure is aknowledged at the consumer end (my advice to foreign raw-milk-cheese lovers would be : come to France for the real thing...). This FDA Import Alert 1203 lists the authorized French cheese makers who can export to the US. The Etablissements Jacquin (36 - Indre) is among them. But the worse of this story is that France never tried to fight to defend its real-cheese heritage, as Andrew Durnford, a Paris-based broker for Cheese Works, notes in this San Francisco Chronicle article : "They haven't battled anything at all as far as I can make out, they've acceded". If the French yield to the FDA, then it is no surprise that they won't defend their remaining real-food from the European Union, like when the French courts imposed heavy fines to the non-profit group Kokopelli for selling ancient-varieties seeds of vegetables, the sale of which is forbidden in France if the varieties are not listed in the French official directory or in the samely-official European Catalog !...[choose a vegetable type and click on "rechercher" to see the allowed varieties]. You can't sell the seeds of the other, ancient vegetables, and the message of the French authorities is clear : they want these authentic, non-hybrid varieties out... The cheese roomAfter looking at the goats, we walk into the cheese processing rooms proper, several connected tiny rooms having gone a few years ago through some of the renovations imposed by the sanitary agencies, but which I think are not sanitized and sterilized, which is better for a real product. The picture above shows the early stage of the goat cheese : the faisselle, as it is called at this stage, is left on a draining rack where the petit lait (little milk, or whey) which is translucent and not whitish like milk, drops in a bucket. The farmer says that sometimes the wey is given back to the goat, but she doubts it really feasible, the goats being very fussy about their food...
From this new-born Faisselle, to the 5-month-old cheese on the top, the goat cheese will come through all sort of shapes with quite different textures and aromas, the latter one being for real afficionados (or deranged palates some would say). The goat cheese was wrapped with plane-tree leaves in october (which is more like 5 months than 6 months as thought initially btw) when the leaves fall, and they were stored by the dozens in a big pot in a side of one of the rooms, with a few crumpled thin-plastic bags at the top to prevent the moisture to go away. According to the rules, she is not supposed to wrap the cheese in these leaves but she has done that for 40 years and won't stop. No air-conditionning here, just the plain, natural process. Hygiénistes should be obliged to live several months the farm life and eat the farm products before having the right to make laws on the subject I buy her two more leaf-wrapped cheeses, checking those that seem soft under the hand. The farmer says that the rules even oblige them to buy a special, expensive paper to wrap the cheese (that they don't use here) when they sell it to a customer. A friend farmer enquired and said it cost some 150 Euro for a 17 or 18 kilogram roll. She says that she had the visit of a sanitary-agency employee who asked how much time more she thought she would be in the trade (the guy understood of course that the small facility was far to pass the norm test). She answered that it depended of himself (he could have the cheese farm close right away) and also of her own health, her husband being not in shape to help. It shows that the state employees in charge of checking the cheese facilities can look the other way and let cheese farmers alone when they want to, but they don't show this same generosity for the new cheese facilities set up by young people.I told my host that I buy cheese from different artisan producers but like particularly the taste of her cheese. She says that the difference in taste comes with the affinage : here it is done under real air and not air-conditionned, and the cheese follows a normal course that benefits to its quality. She has a friend who makes cheese under aseptized and air-conditionning and the taste is less strong, plus it needs more time to evolve by lack of microbian activity.The irony is that they are obliged then to bring in artificially some bacteria to get the cheese evolve (doesn't it remind you some aspects of modern winemaking ?). The person in question has so many goats that he can't avoid the rules. My host has other stories about the harrassment that cheese farmers suffered in the region to get the agrément allowing the sale of the cheese, sometimes it is a simple corner of non-conform cement wall that can put the commercialization in jeopardy. A 7-year Fié Gris, a variant of Sauvignon, for this cheese Looking in my cellar for a wine that could fit (you know that old goat cheese, like other strong cheeses, is hard to pair with a wine or vice versa), I spotted this Fié Gris 2002 by Jacky Preys. Fié Gris is an ancient grape variety (also called Sauvignon Rose or Sauvignon Gris), part of the Sauvignon family. It was re-introduced by Jacky Preys in the Loire, and vignerons throughout France like Ghislaine and Jean-Hugues Goisot in northern Burgundy took their own Fié-Gris vineroots at Jacky Preys. His small-yields, 110-year-old Fié-Gris vines make a very aromatic wine. That's my last bottle of Fié Gris 2002 and I regret not to have bought more of it : the wine, which is a pleasure by itself, stands rather well the 5-month leafed goat-cheese. I have to say that the runny cream of the cheese (even I didn't dare to eat the outside with its billions of bacteria...) is not as strong in taste as the same-age dry one. The ammonia notes are only discernable somewhere on the sides and the experience (even if visually challenging) could be even make a first-time try with old cheese for a novice. The wine has a Muscat side due to its age, also ripe-fruit aromas and fills beautifully the mouth. B. feels some raspberry notes. The pairing with the hardened, dry goat-cheese is more arduous, but, well, that's OK. This latter cheese is really on the strong, ammonia side and frankly if you enjoy it, you don't want to be disturbed by the wine. The third pour of Fié Gris in the glass lets other aromas come up, like elder-tree flower and lychee. Beautiful. Short-pruned trees, spotted that day in the vicinity P.S. I just tasted another leaf-wrapped cheese (I bought several of them that day) and this one was not runny although with a soft texture, but it was veeeeeery strong indeed. Also, it had such a greasy feel when you held it with your fingers to peel the soft rind away (which probably had billions of microscopic living-organisms), it was unbelievable and quite stinky, each time I went to the kitchen sink to rinse my fingers and the knife, but the intense taste and particular melting feel of this cheese in the mouth were unique. This cheese had the same age than the other leaf-wrapped one, but had evolved differently I guess. Beautiful, but not for novice cheese amateurs (and also for some experienced ones : B. refused to eat more of it)... There was still some Fié Gris in the bottle in the fridge but it had a hard time to find its place with this second version.

Comments

[Ray Walker]

Bert,the photos and writing are beautiful as always. The cheese looks great. We had something while out there that looked similar and it was delicious. Keep up the great work!

[Putnam]

Awesome. Thank you goats.

[Jeff Butler]

Really beautiful writing and photos. Superb stuff- many and sincere thanks for your time and effort on this blog!

Regards,

Jeff

[Manuel Aguinaga]

Nice writing, nice photos, nice cheese, nice white, nice farmer lady, nice goats, nice farm....ugly rules

I want to be back at Loire to find nice things..

Thanks Bertrand,
Manuel

[Jack Everitt]

The difficulty in getting imported raw milk cheeses in the US is quite annoying. Sounds like it won't ever be getting better. :(

[Bertrand]

Hi Jack,
I knew that as a cheese lover, this would interest you...
Any regulation can be changed overnight, I think, especially if real-food consumers increase their weight in the debate (the growing number of farmers markets is a sign) and if a mainstream health research establishes the benefits of raw milk and related products...

[Iris]

Salut Bertrand - encore une histoire de fromage de chèvre, qui me met l'eau à la bouche et les larmes aux yeux, quand je pense, que bientôt, cela aussi va disparaitre grâce aux hygiénistes fous de règlementations...

J'ai un vin en cave, que je testerais bien en accord (un rosé de Merlot, élevé 4 ans sous voile), pour voir, s'il tiendra tête à ces merveilles...

[david Nutt]

A good story

GK Chesterton: “The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”

Voila: www.tastingtoeternity.com. This book is a poetic view of 30 of the best loved French cheeses with an additional two odes to cheese. Recipes, wine pairing, three short stories and an educational section complete the book.

From a hectic life on Wall Street to the peace and glories of the French countryside lead me to be the co-founder of www.fromages.com. Ten years later with the words of Pierre Androuet hammering on my brain:

“Cheese is the soul of the soil. It is the purest and most romantic link between humans and the earth.”

I took pen and paper; many reams later with the midnight oil burning Tasting to Eternity was born and self published.

I believe cheese and wine lovers should be told about this publication.

Enjoy.

[Antoinette]

Hello Bertrand,

Where is this goats cheese making place? I am going to the Loire Valley this spring and would like to visit it.

[Bertrand]

Hi Antoinette, Sorry, I'm afraid you can't find this cheese farm operating anymore, read my last post... You can visit the one I tell about today.

[Liesel]

HI

I am going to Burgundy and wanted to do a goats cheese course or visit a farm, any idea on how I go about this?

Thanks

[Bertrand]

I guess you would have to speak French first. Then you look for a cheese farm in google, type ferme fromage de chèvre, with the region of France where you want to go and you should find the contact info of goat cheese farms.