What were you doing two years ago? Maybe you voted in an important election or sang your heart out to the newly released movie “Wicked” in theaters. Perhaps you placed a wheel of cheese on a shelf in your cellar in the Jura mountains of eastern France and waited.
If it’s the latter, congratulations! That cheese could now be the best in the world, according to judges at the prestigious World Cheese Awards who gathered in Spain on Thursday to sample more than 5,000 dairy products to decide on the winners.
Despite a close final round with heavyweight contenders from Italy, Switzerland and Spain, the eventual champion was Comté, a nutty, crumbly and highly complex 24-month-aged wine from France’s eastern borders.
“Obviously, it’s the complexity,” Spanish expert Rafael Dominguez González, one of 14 super judges who each favored one cheese in the tense final round of the competition, said of his selection.
“We see how it changes in the mouth. It starts to develop into different layers of flavor, beautiful nutty layers. It definitely left its mark here.”
The winning Comté, a hard cheese made from unpasteurized milk from the Franche-Comté region bordering Switzerland, was aged in Fort des Rouses by Juraflor, a traditional family-run affineur (cheese ripening company) founded in 1907.
“I’m very happy,” Franck Arnault, a descendant of Giulaflore’s founder, said at the ceremony via video link. “Next year we will be celebrating our 120th anniversary, but we have always been a family business. This news is very exciting for me and I can’t wait to share it with others.”
After crossing the Pyrenees to reach the Spanish city of Córdoba, where this year’s awards ceremony will be held, the winning wheels faced an even tougher journey, passing through multiple rounds of judging before reaching the final 14.
A total of 5,330 cheeses from 45 countries gathered at the competition venue, where the cheeses were laid out on a series of tables and evaluated by a panel of judges for taste, smell, appearance, texture and mouthfeel. “Super Gold” award winners from each table proceeded to a second round of sampling, where a live on-stage tasting session determined the champion.
It was close though. Each of the 14 final judges gave a score of 7 out of 7, and the winner, Comté, was neck-and-neck with Swiss mountain cheese (described by cheese writer and event host Patrick McGuigan as a “big, big kid”) and a young French sheep’s milk cheese with a score of 81. Conte won the tiebreaker as he had the smallest scoring range.
Mr McGuigan said the winning cheese was greatly aided by its ripeness, especially its appetizing appearance. “You see the color, that deep, dark golden color? Basically, it comes from time,” he said in his onstage review.
“Some people claim that time is the fifth ingredient in cheese. There’s the milk, the starter culture, the rennet, the salt. But time plays a huge role in the development of flavor. To me, it speaks of summer pastures, a really golden color, cows eating grass…”
While raw milk cheese faces strict import regulations in countries like the U.S. due to health concerns, aged varieties like Comte easily pass the FDA’s 60-day aging requirement. Still, given that each wheel takes two years to produce, American cheese lovers will need to act quickly to secure a slice of the winning lot before supplies run out.
According to Judge Dominguez González, there should be a reward for those who accomplish that.
“I love my friends…I love my girlfriend, and I knew I would love this cheese,” he said. “I’m very happy.”
