Jacqueline Friedrich: The Wine Humanist WINE BY PEOPLE, FOR PEOPLE; WINE FROM THE HEART

The post below is an article I wrote for the Wall Street Journal. While discussing the Roquefort situation with my good friend, that Angel in America, Odessa Piper, I spoke of this article. She wanted to read it. As I don't subscribe to the WSJ I cannot retrieve old articles from their website. So I retyped it. The article
was published on 6/20/2000 in the WSJ. They entitled it “The French Move Their Cheese – Down-market”.

Dateline: Clermont-Ferrand, France

St. Nectaire is made from the milk of cows who graze the high pasture land of the massif central in the villages south of here. It’s an ancient cheese, and one of 35 with Appellation d’Origine Controlee status, which means it comes from a delimited region and is made according to methods sanctioned by the government. It’s also a personal favorite. A cheese merchant once took me to a dirt cave lost in the Auvergne countryside, one of the many cellars in which he ripened his St. Nectaires on rye straw mats, as tradition dictates. Using a long, hollow cheese corer called a sonde, he dug into a four-month-old version to give me a taste. The flavor was as resonant and complex as a fine wine.

The uncompromising individuality of that St. Nectaire is surely what De Gaulle had in mind when he boasted that it was impossible to over a country that made 324 cheeses. In 1989 Patrick Rance, author of the authoritative tome “French Cheese,” counted 750 different cheeses. Today there are probably more – many more. The problem is, an increasing number of them taste exactly alike. And that’s deliberate.

Not only have industrial groups lie Lactalis swallowed up many artisanal dairies, making for more uniform versions of Camembert, to name just one classic cheese, bu corporations like Bongrain and Bel regularly invent new cheeses – simulating archetypes like Coulommiers, Pont l’Eveque and Munster – which they put on the market with expensive ad campaigns and high concept packaging. (Last year there were 99 cheese “innovations” – though some are simply spreadable versions of, say, Brie or Emmenthal, and others are diet versions of pre-existing cheeses.)

Unlike my flavorful St. Nectaire, all of these cheeses are made from pasteurized or ultrafiltered milk. They have long shelf lives and are manufactured in such a way that they won’t change at all. A real cheese evolves.

St. Nectaire, for example, will lose moisture over time. Its rind will develop molds that help it ripen, and its flavor will deepen. A young Camembert will have a chalky center. As it matures, creaminess will extend from its edges to its core, and it will take on truffly, nutty flavors that are inimitable. That’s why you see cheese-mongers palpating their Camemberts.

Industrial cheeses are ready the minute you buy them. The industrial Camembert types, for example, are stabilized to stay uniformly mild and creamy for the duration of their lives on the shelf or in the fridge. And all of these cheeses have common flavor characteristics. By design, as representatives of several dairies told me, they are “unctuous and bland, without typicity.”

Frederic Salle, the director general of Celia, one of France’s top 20 dairy companies, said, “No matter what people say, what they want to eat is cheese that is creamy, tender and bland.” Celia produces some market leaders such as Chaussee aux Moines and Ortolan, of which Salle says, “Our target audience is everyone in France. These are cheeses that please everybody. In fact, “ he adds, “there are two types of cheese consumption in France. Daily eating, and weekend or festive eating. When people are preparing a special cheese platter, they’ll choose something more type, something to go with a good bottle of wine, a raw milk cheese, maybe an Appellation Controlee.”

I decided to sample France’s leading “everyday” cheeses, though I eliminated from consideration the very popular processed cheeses like Laughing Cow (La Vache Qui Rit) and its spin-off, Apericubes (flavored with asparagus or salmon and so forth), as well as the herb- and garlic-flavored, stabilized fresh cheeses such as Boursin and Tartare. I wanted to teste real cheese. Two came to mind immediately because of their ad campaigns: Caprice des Dieux, a soft, oval-shaped Camembert or Brie-type knockoff with a bloomy rind, and Chaussee aux Moines, a round, uncooked cheese titularly in the same category as St. Nectaire and Cheddar as well as Port Salut, which it more closely resembles. (The two alone, which produce 8000 and 5000 metric tons a year respectively, almost equal the annual production of St. Nectaire (13,873 metric tons), the fifth-most-important Appellation Controllee cheese.)

The Caprice des Dieux was snowy white throughout, extremely creamy, with absolutely no flavor and a rind as thick as leather. (A friend, however, said it was no worse than industrial Brie. Maybe, but that’s another story.) Chaussee aux Moines, as well as Bonbel and Cousteron, two other popular members of the same family, were creamy and tasted vaguely of lactic acid, but were mostly rubbery. They were totally indistinguishable. St. Albray and Chaumes are two high-profile cheeses in the Pont l’Eveque mold. Both had very buttery color and texture, an appealing odor of cheese, but no flavor – except the rind, which tasted like plaster.

Despite the fact that they are aiming for anonymity of taste and smell, the companies producing these cheeses base their ad campaigns on “tradition” and terroir (the code name for regional character). A telling irony this: French consumers apparently want to believe their buying the same gutsy, distinct cheeses grandpa ate, but they don’t want to experience the guts or the character.

This may explain a recent development: Within the past three years a number of major dairies have introduced new products disguised as flavorful ancestral cheeses.

St. Aubin, created by Bongrain (the source of Caprice des Dieux and St. Albray) hit the ground running in 1997. Presented in an open wood box, wrapped in waxy paper and tied with a plastic straw, it looks like a Coulommiers (a soft-ripened cheese that is first cousin to Camembert), with pale orange tinges showing through its bloomy rind. It even smells a bit like real cheese. Cut into it, and it’s uniformly unctuous, with very little flavor. But it sure looks convincing. And its runaway success prompted the invention of copycat cheeses from no less a giant than Lactalis, the country’s major producer of Appellation Controlee cheeses, including Brie, Camembert and Roquefort. Their Brin de Paille Lanquetot, a round, flat disk that looks like a large St. Marcellin, has a similarly blooming rind. Brin de Paille means “a bit of straw,” and the cheese is presented in an open wood box on a bed of rye straw—like my archetypal St. Nectaire. But here the straw is plastic and it never touches the actual cheese – which is completely inviolable in its shrink wrap. Brin de Paille tastes exactly like St. Aubin.

Why create what industry people are now calling a vrai-faux produit traditionnel when there are hundreds of authentic ones in the French hexagon to choose from? “Brie, Camembert, Munster and all the other generics are losing their market share,” explained Carole Charbonnel, a spokesperson for Bongrain. “Sales of generic Camembert have dropped 25%. This is a strong trend. At the same time, sales of our specialty cheeses are growing. People are looking for novelty. They’re tired of eating the same old Camembert day after day and week after week. So we were looking for an original product that would attract people who habitually ate Camembert or Coulommiers. Our dairy in Anjou came up with St. Aubin, which has a unique texture. It’s always creamy, unlike Camembert which starts off like laster and ends up runny. And market testing reveals that consumers think St. Aubin is an ancient cheese. They think it’s an Appellation because St. Aubin is a village like Pont l’Eveque or Livarot. So it’s an innovation that seems always to have existed.”

In May, Bongrain launched a new vrai-faux produit traditionnel, St. Aubin Grande Charactere, to compete head on with Camembert. I haven’t yet tasted it, but Ms. Charbonnel described its falvor as more intense than the original St. Aubin, which was designed to face off with Coulommiers.

An optimist might theorize that these vrai-faux cheeses are like stepping stones: A consumer can progress from Caprice des Dieux to St. Aubin and then to a farmhouse St. Nectaire the way a neophyt wine drinker might graduate from blush zinfandel to Cote Rotie. On the other hand, as the industry magazine Lineaires notes, the sheer number of cheese innovations is pushing the traditional versions off the shop shelves. In a decade, faithful consumers of traditional, terroir-linked cheeses might not find anything worthy of the name in their markets. Worse still, the French may be losing the taste for the flavorful traditional cheeses. They love the fact that they have 324 (or 750); they just want them all to taste the same.



© Jacqueline Friedrich 2000


Note: in the text I say that Lactalis produces appellation conrolee Camembert. Since this article was published, however, the laws have been tightened, limiting the Camembert de Normandie aoc to raw milk cheeses – thus eliminating the Lactalis versions. Lactalis has tried to defeat this legislation.