Quality in every whiff
The Sun-Herald: November 26, 2006

The cheese roads of Auvergne can take some interesting turns along the whey, Johanna Hegerty writes.

THE BIG doors close behind us and we’re underground, enveloped in cool, moist air. The smell is overwhelming: heady, frowsty and thick. It’s an unmistakeable, unforgettable odour. With the flick of a switch, row after row of fluorescent lamps blossom overhead, revealing two long benches that disappear into the distance; resting here, as far as the eye can see, is cheese.

Felix Malvezin strides ahead, then stops to carve off three chunks of cantal for each of us to chew on; each piece is about the size of a good wedge of brie. We munch our way along the tunnel, Felix pointing out the new arrivals, with their whitish-yellow skins, and the mature cheeses, covered in a reddish bloom.

For 30 years this old railway tunnel was forgotten, save for local kids who would run into the cavernous darkness as far as they dared. In the 1960s this and four other disused tunnels in the vicinity were turned into caves, maturing cellars, for the famous Auvergne cheeses.

With its naturally consistent temperature and humidity, the 360-metre Tunnel de Montagnaguet seems the perfect place for curds to come of age.

Local farms and dairies around the St Flour area deliver their 60-day-old cantal and salers cheeses here and Felix and his team of two men oversee their development. Each round, weighing roughly 43 kilograms, is wiped down twice a week with a bit of hessian cloth to remove excess bacteria, but for the most part, the cheeses sit quietly on their wooden benches in the darkness. As Felix says: “Man has finished with the milk, it’s time for nature to get to work.”

The Auvergne in central France is the country’s least-populated and most remote region, characterised by imposing volcanoes that predate the Alps and the Pyrenees. It’s a dramatic landscape of craggy peaks and deep green valleys carved by ancient rivers. High up in the clouds lie vast, fertile pastures inhabited only by herds of cattle. Here one might see a lonely stone hut and think, “Who could live out here?” The people of the Auvergne live with long summers and winters thick with snow; they eke out a living from the land, growing vegetables where the terrain allows it; but mostly they make cheese.

So distinct are the flavours from the volcanic soils here that five of the region’s cheeses have been granted appellation d’origine controlee (AOC) status - the same quality guarantee given to wine from significant areas.

It’s on a windswept plateau high in the Monts Dore that my partner and I seek out the region’s most intriguing product: salers. We weave along D-roads, passing ramshackle villages. The only signs of life are the odd tractor and birds of prey floating in thermals. A brown-and-white sign points up what appears to be a vertical dirt track: “Les Routes des Fromages.” It’s unlikely we’d ever have stumbled upon this road ourselves: in fact, the chances of us veering off the A75 willy-nilly were pretty slim. Like most people, we were headed south on the motorway to the Mediterranean and would have passed through the Auvergne without a second thought when we came across a leaflet about the cheese route, a collection of 50-odd farms, dairies and maturing cellars open to the public.

The regulations for meeting AOC standards are tough, but none more so than for salers. This hard cheese can be made only from the raw milk of a breed of cattle of the same name - and only between April 15 and November 15 when the cows graze on the wild summer herbs and flowers, including liquorice and arnica, that give the cheese its spicy flavour.

At Morcombe farm Madame Joncoux shows us photos on the wall of salers being made: curds stirred in a wooden barrel, then pressed by hand. They must be 30 years old. “No,” she laughs, “that’s my husband. These pictures were taken three years ago!”

For salers to be the real thing it has to be made using traditional instruments. The farmer must make the cheese immediately after milking the cows in their pastures, which is where those lonely stone huts come in: they have provided shelter and been makeshift dairies for generations.

After tasting the robust cheese and a few slices of the farm’s charcuterie, we follow Monsieur Joncoux into the grasslands to meet the cows, a handsome, russet-coloured breed with knowing faces. The high pastures they graze on are endlessly green, the land between sky and earth blurred. We stand for a minute in silence, listening to the music of the cows’ bells, distant and close. “I love it here,” Monsieur Joncoux says. He’s a man of few words.

Before the cows and the cheese there was the village of Salers, and here we stop for the night. It’s a grand little place that hasn’t changed much since the 16th century: philosophy is still discussed in the tea salons, and brooding Renaissance buildings adorn the cobbled streets. From Promenade de Barrouze the panoramic view of Puy Violent is unforgettable; one-time glacial gorges melt down from the extinct volcano, the ubiquitous herds grazing on impossible slopes.

Cheese is heavy on the menu that night and we gorge ourselves on more salers and cantal, as well as the soft, creamy Saint-Nectaire. There’s a notable absence of blue, considering that two of the famous five are of the mouldy variety. I’m a sucker for a good blue, and the prospect of non-pasteurised, non-homogeneous cheese sends us north to Ferme des Croix de Chazelles, near Aveze. The farm is run by three brothers: Dominique, Bertrand and Christophe Vergnol, and is the only stop on the cheese route where you’ll find farm-produced Bleu d’Auvergne and Fourme d’Ambert.

“Raw milk is better for the taste,” says Dominique, offering a wedge on the end of a knife, “you get more from the cheese.” Certainly the Bleu d’Auvergne is harder and yellower with a good, sharp bite and the Fourme d’Ambert creamier than the more common dairy-produced versions. The brothers also produce Bleu d’Aveze, a powerful but velvety blue, the perfect partner to a sweet white on a warm day.

Legend has it that blue cheese was invented not far from here when a farmer left a loaf of rye bread in the curing room of his farm, causing it to go mouldy. As an experiment he added some of the blue growth to a batch of curds and enriched the world by discovering the culinary delights of mouldy cheese.

Production methods haven’t changed much since that fateful day in the 1800s, the only difference being that the penicillium roqueforti now comes in a little bottle rather than off a week-old loaf.

Dominique takes great delight in telling us this story, then shows us into the small dairy to demonstrate the needling process, where holes are made in the fresh, pressed curds, allowing air in and the mould to grow.

“Come, come, you must meet Nini,” he says, and leads us to the shed. Nini is his favourite cow and today she is the proud mother of a wary-looking calf. The farm has 60 head of cattle of the black-and-white Montbeliarde breed, known as la sacree vache, the sacred cow, and the Vergnol brothers know them all by name.

Over the next couple of days, we go to St Donat and meet Madame Charbonnel, who explains why it’s women who have always made Saint-Nectaire cheese.

At Valbeleix we arrive at a family-run dairy in time to see the whole process and are invited into the family kitchen to try gateau tomme, which is like brioche but more cheesy. We see the AOC cheeses being made on a grand scale and in what must be France’s smallest cellar.

After three days touring the Auvergne cheese route, I’m at the point where I’ve almost overdone it - something I wouldn’t have thought possible.

As the road winds back towards the A75 I lie back in the passenger seat and think of Tunnel de Montagnaguet with its dripping walls and wooden doors. I imagine those 3500 cheeses waiting in there in the dark; I’ll never forget that smell.

TRIP NOTES
* Email info@fromages-aoc-auvergne.com to ask for the free leaflet Welcome to the Auvergne RDO Cheese Route, which includes a map. (www.fromages-aoc-auvergne.com)

* If you want to wake up to cow bells, stay at a farm involved in the Welcome to the Farm scheme. (www.bienvenue-a-la-ferme.com)

* Stay in tastefully restored rooms with an artist’s flair for detail at Chambres d’Hotes de l’Asphodele, in Salers. Family room and self-catering available. (www.chambres-hotes-salers.com)

* Air France flies to Clermont-Ferrand. (www.airfrance .com.au)