Franche Comte & Savoie
Over the 35 years in business I have made the once or sometimes twice a year pilgrimage to producers in Franche Comte and Savoie to taste through batches of cheese for the coming year. However, this year for the first time, I didn’t go, instead enlisting David who has been working with us for 14 years and is the font of all cheese knowledge for all the cheese team, and Harry our newest recruit who trained in the retail cheese area alongside David, but has now become part of the wholesale team. It’s interesting that Harry started as a Christmas contract student in the warehouse assisting the wholesale as well as online departments. He enjoyed the experience and decided to stay on and get more involved in cheese.
David knows exactly our cheese imprint for flavour, style and texture that relate to La Fromagerie and how we want to represent the cheeses. I often say that customers should be able to tell the ‘thumbprint’ of a La Fromagerie cheese to give them the complete picture of how we work and the ethos behind the business. My reasons behind standing back from the trip this year was to empower them and not have me there to influence their judgement. They would independently taste and decide. Here below is Harry’s diary of the trip; his first experience which I think highlights his excitement but also forms his complete respect for not just the cheese but the tradition around every part of the way of life in the regions. We live in a world that often misrepresents our food culture but La Fromagerie celebrates terroir, tradition and taste.
PATRICIA MICHELSON
A TRIP TO FRANCHE COMTE AND SAVOIE:
by HARRY ENGLISH, whole
April 2026
Once a year, we set out to the Eastern corner of France to the homeland of two of our most important cheeses: Comté and Beaufort Chalet d’Alpage. Comté is our bestseller by a long shot, and not undeservedly so, while Beaufort Chalet d’Alpage holds much sentimental value, being the first ever cheese to be sold at La Fromagerie. Our objective for this trip is to catch up with our suppliers and sample different wheels to choose which ones we want to stock.
We touched down in Geneva and picked up the hire car with Swiss-like efficiency, and made our way out of the city, past the vast lake and into the Jura mountains. It was my first time in this part of France, and the birthplace of Comté was just as idyllic as I’d imagined. It felt like being inside the Asterix books I used to read when I was younger. We passed through toy-like villages nestled between big green hills, decorated with spruce trees and the area’s famous Montbéliarde cows grazing on lush Spring grass pasture.
Our first stop was La Fruitière des Suchaux, the producer and affineur of our 24 month Comté. Suchaux is one of the few fruitières (the French word for a traditional cooperative dairy owned by the farms supplying the milk) in the area who both produce and mature their own Comté, the milk coming from a cooperative of 10 nearby farms. Ludovic, our guide, spoke with a thick Franche-Comté accent, I had to concentrate to keep up at times. He explained to us that the summer of 2024 had been a difficult one in this corner of the Doubs region, with heavy rain depleting much of the cows’ feed and leading to gaps in production.
It’s easy, as a cheese eater, to romanticise the lives behind the produce, picturing the cowherds spending summer up in beautiful pastures. In reality, the work is relentless: physical, demanding, and dependent on environmental factors far beyond one’s control. This was at the front of my mind as Ludovic heaved the 40 kilogram wheels off the maturing shelves to give us samples of his stock. Today, robots take care of the flipping and washing, but historically this would all have been done by hand.
We tasted a couple of dozen batches from his 2024 and 2025 ranges, and as always I was amazed by the difference in flavour between cheeses that had been produced just days apart. We settled on a number of June and August wheels, which we agreed had the most character and best showcased their signature Suchaux flavour.
With a bit of time to spare before our next appointment, we decided to stop in at La Fromagerie du Mont d’Or Sancey-Richard, with whom we have a longstanding relationship. Their speciality is, unsurprisingly, Vacherin Mont d’Or, but due to current restrictions by the UK Agricultural department related to Lumpy Skin Disease in France we are unable, at the moment, to import raw cows’ milk products that has not had a heat treatment above 40 degrees. It does seem strange to me that the French government has not imposed any restrictions during this time; but we have managed to get hold of their Morbier, however, as they have started heating the milk just above 40 degrees, which has finally returned to our shops after a long absence.
Sancey-Richard is owned by Eddie and Elodie, a young married couple who met in cheese school. Elodie is from the Savoie, but made the move across Lake Geneva to run the Fromagerie du Mont d’Or with Eddie, a proud Jurassien. After a bit of catching up, Eddie offered me my first ever glass of Macvin du Jura, a sweet, fortified wine from the area which tasted of honey and orange zest. I drank this alongside two different age profiles of their very own Morbier. The young one was sweet with a smooth texture and a clean acidity, while the older one was more intense and salty with notes of hazelnut. After thanking them for their hospitality, we hopped back in the car to make the short trip up the hill towards Marcel Petite.
If Fruitière des Suchaux was a quiet Comté village, Fort Saint Antoine was a Comté megacity. A converted underground military base which holds 100,000 wheels of Comté at any given time, and this is ONE of their (soon to be) FOUR sites. And yet, despite the incredible scale they work at, every wheel is tasted, monitored and properly cared for, from the freshly delivered 2-day-old baby wheels to the oldest residents at 36 months and above. All of this is overseen by just 115 people, so organisation is paramount.
Of course, no amount of meticulousness can account for all the variables that affect the development of a cheese; from what the cows have been eating to produce the raw milk, through to the age of the spruce tree used to make the shelf that each particular wheel sits on, to the specific combination of microbes embedded in it. The affineurs do not take this for granted. Our guide, Benoit, compared the Comté on the shelves to fruit on a tree. They must work out when a wheel is underripe, overripe, or ready to eat. Each wheel matures at a different rate, and some have longer lifespans than others, so all decisions are based on their expert judgement. The proof of this expertise lies in the cheese itself - the consistently clean flavour, the paper-thin rind and the absence of any cracks or holes in the paste.
Fromagerie Marcel Petite have pioneered Comté affinage ever since their acquisition of Fort Saint Antoine in 1966; in many ways, they are the reason Comté looks and tastes how it does today. Before Marcel Petite established his affinage business, Comté more closely resembled an Emmental in appearance: the paste was full of holes and the cheese was aged for a much shorter period at higher temperatures. Marcel Petite saw how the Swiss approached their affinage giving their cheeses a big fruity hit and a delicious richness making them gain prominence and popularity but also the price escalated. Here was a chance for Marcel to experiment with a much slower, cooler style of aging (‘affinage lent’), which allowed the cheeses to retain moisture and develop a deeper, more nuanced flavour. This approach was initially met with suspicion, even outrage, from rival affineurs, but it soon became the standard across the region. Today, finding a hole in a wheel of Comté would be a shock; I’d sooner assume a mouse had gotten to it. Such was Marcel Petite’s huge influence on this cheese.
We bade goodbye to Franche-Comté to skirt through Geneva, and were welcomed into the Savoie by its snowcapped mountains. Our next meeting was with Éric, the head of Caves d’Affinage de Savoie, whose Beaufort Chalet d’Alpage has been a La Fromagerie staple since 1991. Before Eric took over the caves Patricia worked with Savoie cheese legend Denis Provent, who inherited the caves from his father. Éric matures his prized Alpage Beaufort in Chambéry, in a cave dug into the side of a hill. Long before iit housed cheese, it was used by the local brewers to store ice brought down from the Bauges mountains as a means of refrigeration. As I drove up the winding road the sat-nav was not helping me find the location; from the outside, it looked like an abandoned bus shelter, half-hidden by foliage and covered in graffiti. Whether intentional or not, the unsuspecting exterior gives little indication that a treasure haul of cheese lies behind its doors, which I’m sure is of great comfort to Éric.
To make Beaufort Chalet d’Alpage, one must adhere to the strict rules imposed by the Appellation of Origin. To list just a few of these stipulations, the cheese can only be made between June and October, above 1500 metres in altitude, from the milk of a single herd of cows, and must be produced twice per day. All this is carried out by only two people: they work tirelessly over the summer, taking care of the herd, milking twice daily, hauling hundreds of litres of milk, stirring steaming vats of curd and lugging 40-kilo wheels. When they find time to sleep, I’m not entirely sure.
Since cheesemaking happens twice a day, each wheel serves as a record of one specific morning or afternoon on one specific mountain, frozen in time. Of course, cheese could be made in far simpler ways. Production could be scaled up and the processes moved into a factory where every step could be carried out by machinery, and thousands of kilos could be churned out per day. But these methods persist, despite the inconvenience and inefficiency they impose - because they are a testament to human beings choosing the difficult path, and choosing it not out of the ignorance of the alternatives, but because they believe the difficult path produces something worth preserving. And perhaps the path itself is worth preserving too. The Beaufort Chalet d’Alpage represents all that La Fromagerie embraces, and that is why it stands in the centre of each of our Cheese Rooms. It tells not just a story in every bite but also a way of life.
