11-04-2025
The best Comté cheeses and the wines to drink with them
Salty delight
What keeps the British away is that it often rains during July and August (although with encroaching climate change, less than it used to). But without that rain, you would not have the lush pastures which cover the high Jurassian plateaus, lovingly showcased in the film. And without that grass to feed the cows, you would not have the nutty, salty delight that is comté cheese.
In Orgelet, there's a fromagerie which sells some of the best comté in the local area (and fictionalised in Holy Cow). If you don't arrive at 8am on the dot, you're liable to wait in an ever-lasting queue while the locals buy kilo after kilo of reasonably priced cheese – young, fruité or more mature. At Christmas, they bring out the 24-month or even 36-month aged rounds.
The quantities sold are so vast that there is a special cutting machine to speed up the slicing of the 40kg wheels. Each tranche is then lovingly wrapped in the metallic paper that is the cheese's satisfying hallmark. No poxy 100g purchases here – an average slab of mature cheese is about 500g, which in my village would set you back around eight euros.
When they were younger, my children enjoyed watching this – so much so that once in Waitrose, when my then 10-year-old son spotted the woman at the deli counter cutting the cheese badly, he whispered to me: 'What's the lady doing to the comté, Mummy?'
In the unusual event the shop is closed (it's even open on a Sunday morning, when the church bells ring to entice the lapsed Catholics to church), there's a cheese vending machine outside where you can buy ready-cut slabs. Incidentally, Orgelet is also the birthplace of La Vache Qui Rit, although production now takes place in nearby Lons-le-Saunier.
The maturing process
Comté is growing in popularity in the UK – sales are up 40 per cent at Tesco. But it seems that popularity has yet to translate into tourism in the region. That's a shame: there are co-operative and family-run fruitières dotted all over the countryside where wheel after wheel of comté is made.
As the film shows, the delicate process involves heating the finest fresh Montbéliarde cow milk in giant copper vats, adding rennet and curdling the milk, separating the curds from the whey and then moulding the curds into rounds.
When they are firm enough, wheels are transported into the Jura mountains to be aged for at least four months in vast cellars in the Napoleonic Fort des Rousses or the Fort Saint-Antoine, close to the Swiss border. Some are also aged in the town cellars of Poligny, which is known as the capital of Comté. It's a great place to do some concentrated cheese tasting in the shops that line the town square, while the Maison du Comté museum offers insight into the production process.
But thankfully these days you don't have to go all that way to Jura to get a taste of this delicious fromage (or even make the schlep to Borough Market in London, where it's been sold for over 20 years). Most mainstream supermarkets now stock it pre-sliced (albeit not in that lovely crinkly paper), or at the deli counter.
Here, our food expert Xanthe Clay picks her favourites, and wine writer Victoria Moore chooses the best wines to drink with it.
