Cheesemakers, Affineurs and Cheesemongers
Cheesemakers make cheese, affineurs mature it, and cheesemongers select and sell it. This hub brings together guides to these roles and profiles of the businesses behind them. Choose the overview first, then follow a particular maker or monger.
Farmhouse, Artisan and Industrial Cheesemakers Explained
Slabs of curd are turned and stacked by hand.
Neal's Yard Dairy
Under the railway arches in Bermondsey, cheeses are being turned, brushed and washed.
Paxton & Whitfield
A crumbly piece of Lancashire or a soft cheese beginning to flow: you can almost feel the decision forming.
La Fromagerie
A wheel of Beaufort comes home from a skiing trip in Méribel.
The Fine Cheese Co.
Before a wheel reaches the counter, there is a tasting with its maker: a discussion of condition, a choice of cheese, a decision about where it should mature.
Montgomery's Cheddar
First comes the dry, crystalline bite.
Quicke's
Every ten days, the clothbound truckles in Quicke's Cathedral of Cheese get their turn.
Everything in this section
- Sheridans CheesemongersPicture the boxes of Irish farmhouse cheese at Galway's Saturday market.
- Murray's CheeseIn Long Island City, Queens, young wheels of Greensward arrive bound in spruce, ready for washing and a spell in Murray’
- Jasper Hill FarmBeneath a Greensboro hillside, seven climate-controlled vaults are busy with the quiet work of ripening.
- Rogue CreamerySyrah grape leaves, soaked in pear spirits, folded by hand around a wheel of blue cheese.
- Cypress GroveCut into a wedge of Humboldt Fog and there it is: a dark seam of ash beneath a white rind.
- Cowgirl CreameryPicture yourself in a converted hay barn in Point Reyes Station, California, in 1997.
- Beecher's Handmade CheeseThrough the windows at Seattle’s Pike Place Market, you can watch milk becoming cheese.
- AndrouëtPicture five cellars, each devoted to a different family of cheese.
- Mons Fromager-AffineurStep inside the converted railway tunnel at Ambierle and you enter a different sort of timetable: six months to more tha
- BeillevaireLook beneath Machecoulais’s lightly pink, wrinkled rind and you find an ivory centre, with a softer layer tucked just un
- Laurent DuboisPicture 120 cheeses assembled into a “pyramide des saveurs”.
- Luigi GuffantiPicture an abandoned silver mine in Valganna, with Gorgonzola quietly taking the place of silver.
- Meredith DairySpread soft goat cheese onto bread and take a bite.
- Kaasaffineurs Van TrichtA young cheese gets a turn.