News

You would never hear of a liquor store employee uncorking a vintner's chardonnay and pouring it into an oak barrel for further aging. With wine there is little opportunity to play with a product that has been bottled and sealed. Yet, this kind of manipulation is possible with a wheel of cheese: It's a living organism and still very responsive to its environment. And more cheese retailers are doing just that. Instead of just storing cheese, they're also undertaking the art of ripening it, a process known as affinage.

The goal is to bring a cheese to its peak flavour, texture, aroma and character. But for the cheese maker, whose brand is stamped on the product, there can be risk. Their name rides on the skills of this new breed of affineur – many of whom are learning on the job in Canada's burgeoning cheese industry.

“As a cheese maker you lose control, if they don't handle it well. It's not their reputation that suffers, it's mine,” says Ruth Klahsen, owner of Ontario's Monforte Dairy. She thinks the growing interest in affinage is good and agrees that there has to be an allowance for experimenting, “but we're asking a lot of amateurs.”

And for the retailer, making an error can result in losing a valuable investment of cheese.

Just out of the mould, a young cheese is like a newborn baby, a bundle of potential that requires countless hours (even years) of care to develop its personality. According to Jean-Philippe Gosselin, affineur and founder of Les Dépendances du Manoir in Quebec, the excellence of a cheese can be attributed 15 per cent to milk quality, 15 per cent to the cheese maker's skill and 70 per cent to the affinage technique.

Mr. Gosselin's mentor of 24 years is affineur Jean-Charles Arnaud, who ages wheels of France's renowned AOC cheese, Comté. (The AOC mark guarantees that a cheese meets the national system of standards.) In Europe, affinage is a separate craft from cheese making, its skills passed from generation to generation.

“Where a cheese sits in the ripening room makes a difference – the humidity or breeze might change in that spot, outside temperature can affect the cheese. A week of rain, a week of extreme heat – everything affects the quality,” Mr. Gosselin says. In some cases balancing all these factors comes down to an intuition built on experience.

So why are retailers jumping on this finicky bandwagon? In the United States there has been an increase in demand for affineurs, says St. Louis, Mo.-based consultant Neville McNaughton, who helps clients set up ripening rooms. “Many stores are doing it on a smaller level,” Mr. McNaughton says. “Retailers are needing to meet a need not being met by the cheese maker.”

With customers demanding cheeses at various ages, stores are taking it upon themselves to meet these requests. It doesn't make economic sense for a cheese maker to ship their cheese in small batches at different ages, so a retailer can add value (and profit) to a product by aging wheels specifically to satisfy demand.

There is also the deep satisfaction of “bringing the cheese to another level,” says Afrim Pristine of Toronto's Cheese Boutique. “We age cheese to have products that you can't get anywhere else,” he says. “I can't buy a 10-year-old cheddar – I have to age it myself.”

Cheese Boutique has been practising affinage for the past 20 years. It has 342 wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano aging in the cheese vault. Mr. Pristine admits it's a huge investment of time, money and energy. But when the results are great, like with the 41/2-year-old Thunder Oak Gouda, Mr. Pristine thinks it showcases both the cheese maker and Cheese Boutique.

And Ms. Klahsen has had success aging her cheese with Mr. Pristine. But she fears that without a proper education system in Canada, the results of an inexperienced affineur may not always be as good and could ruin the products she's worked hard to perfect.

So can a novice affineur harm a cheese maker's reputation? Mr. McNaughton, the consultant, says “in principle, yes. In practice it doesn't seem to be happening.” He cites two reasons: First, the retailers are passionate and take care with the cheese. Second, you have a tolerant consumer who is interested in the “farm to table” closeness of watching a cheese develop. As long as sellers communicate what they are doing, clients understand that this can be a learning process on the retail side.

David Wood, founder of Salt Spring Island Cheese Co., voices another concern. If affinage means taking a fresh cheese – a blank slate – and bringing out its inherent character, whose brand of cheese does it end up being – the cheese maker's or the retailer's?

“It wouldn't work for us – we rely on the cachet of the Salt Spring Island name – if we sell it off as a blank cheese to a retailer to age we are at their mercy for the price we get. We would lose our economic viability … cheese makers need to hang on to their ability to sell their name.”

But economic viability also means getting your product to market as fast as possible. At Vancouver's Les Amis du Fromage, Alison Spurrell works with local cheese makers by paying for cheeses in advance and waiting to receive them when they have matured.

Provincial Fine Foods, which recently opened an affinage in Toronto's east end, is striving to emulate a more European model of cheese ripening. A cheese maker would sell them their young cheeses and leave Provincial to age them as long as necessary. By getting revenue back to the cheese maker as soon as possible, owner Cole Snell hopes to inject sustainability into the Ontario cheese industry. Cash-flow factors make it a challenge for cheese makers to hold on to their cheese, Mr. Snell says. “This is why we don't have a lot of aged cheese in Canada.”

Special to The Globe and Mail