Placing the Cheese in the Cellar
The profession of cheesemonger in my opinion should actually be called ‘cheese selector-finisher.’ After choosing the right cheeses, the skills of our dairy staff is to provide painstaking care to the aging process, which magnifies the work carried out by the cheese manufacturers. Then comes the packaging and order preparation to be sent to our customers.
Son of a cheesemonger, Jean-Yves Bordier calls himself a “selector and finisher” of cheeses. He selects cheeses from quality artisans. Our team places them in our cellar either directly from the producer or thanks to expert merchants who are also longtime friends of Jean-Yves Bordier.
Aging, a step unto itself in the manufacture of a cheese, allows the cheese maturer or affineur to bring the cheeses to their best level for consumption. A true vocation!
The know-how of the cheese mature in our cellars can be summed up in four stages and six steps of care, as many gestures that require great sensitivity, listening attentively to the cheese, expertise in one’s handling and great passion. The role of a cheese maturer is to magnify the work of small, artisan producers, in other words to bring cheese to a level of maturity, a thickness, a specific suppleness and rind that we wish to offer our customers. For some cheeses like goat cheese, we offer different degrees of aging to satisfy all taste buds, as we all have different sensitivities and attractions.
1st Step: Receiving the Cheeses
Each cheese is unwrapped and weighed: on grills for cheeses with delicate surface mold, cheeses with washed rinds and goat cheeses, and on pine boards for harder rinds, either cooked or uncooked.
Jean-Yves Bordier selects his pine boards in the Jura Mountains from a logger who cuts them only at certain phases of the moon.
2nd Step: Tracing
Traceability is one of the most important steps in food safety, a subject which has been taking on more and more importance—both fortunately and unfortunately—in our gastronomic professions. It is a measure to follow or “trace” each product (manufacturing date, entry into the cellar, batch number and manufacturer number). It thus ensures total knowledge about the product’s life cycle, its production and sale. Today, this traceability is mandatory and very strict. It enables officials to isolate and destroy the faulty products in case of an alert.
3rd Step: Placing the Cheese in the Cellar
Once unwrapped, weighed and traced, the cheeses are sent to one of our 7 aging cellars where they continue to age and to express their personality. Each cellar has a specific temperature and humidity according to the family of cheeses stored in each cellar.
Our team of cheese maturers in the cellars also take daily care of the places themselves. They humidify or dry the cellars by adjusting each one’s humidity and temperature.