Happy National Cheese Lovers’ Day! Jill and I are just tickled pink that there’s a national holiday just for us. I only hope our husbands remember the flowers tonight. And by flowers, of course, I mean a nice leaf-wrapped &/or lavender-flecked cheese package.

You know we’re all about spreading the curd love, though, so we’re marking today’s holiday by kicking off a virtual cheese school series right here. Was your New Year’s Resolution to learn more about cheese? Or maybe there’s a question you’ve been too embarrassed to ask your cheesemonger in person. Well, we’ll give an overview of a different cheese topic each week – and take your questions, in the comments, on Twitter or on Facebook. So we hope you’ll follow along, ask a question, or, yes, correct us if we get something wrong. (Especially our cheesemaker and monger friends out there.)

Alpine, or mountain, cheeses are those made from the summer milk of cows that graze on grassy meadows in higher elevations during the warm season. You know, those lush meadows of Sound of Music fame. They are typically semi-firm, full of grassy flavor that evokes those warm summer days when we savor the cheeses in the dead of winter. Some are perfectly smooth, others are studded with sweet little protein crystals, and the flavors range from earthy or nutty to fruity. Gruyere and Comte are two of the most well-known specimens, and while they traditionally do hail from the Alps, there are a growing number of American cheeses made in the same fashion. Technically speaking, the International Association of Mountain Cheese Producers, Caseus Montanus, only recognizes mountain cheeses as those “produced and affiné above 800 m, or approximately 2500 feet,” according to Artisanal.

Most mountain cheeses melt nicely, making them ideal for fondue or grilled cheese. Their recommended wine pairings range from sweet (Reisling) to robust (Barolo or even Zinfandel). Fromagette suggests pairing Hoch Ybrig with a sparkling rosé. And it would be hard to go wrong with beer, specifically a bock or brown ale. I like to serve them with mustards, salami and pickles. The typical advice for serving a cheese board is to use a range of cheese styles, but if you wanted to host a mountain cheese tasting there are enough subtle variations to make it interesting — particularly if you pair up European classics with some American newcomers. Likewise, try mixing the two for an extra-special fondue.

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Alpine cheeses we’ve reviewed include:

• Appenzeller (Switzerland)
• Comte (France)
• Fleur des Alpes (France)
• Hoch Ybrig (Switzerland)

…and these American mountain cheeses:

• Appalachian (Virginia)
• Ascutney Mountain (Vermont)
• Pleasant Ridge Reserve (Wisconsin)
• Tarentaise (Vermont)
• Madame Fromage wrote recently about Spring Brook Farm’s Reading Raclette (Vermont — see a trend here?)

Next week, we’ll talk about some other winter cheese styles (think woodsy). In the meantime, keep up with our Winter Cheese Board selections on Pinterest — and please let us know your favorite mountain cheese in the comments. Cheers!

What kind of cheese do you need when you’re nursing a broken heart? Thanks to my team’s pitiful performance Sunday, I was left with a grumpy disposition and the need for comfort food. Thankfully, I had just the fix in my cheese drawer – Ascutney Mountain from Vermont’s Cobb Hill Cheese.

There must be an evolutionary imperative for craving Alpine-style cheeses this time of year. Maybe it’s because the sweet nuttiness of these firm, yellow beauties remind us that spring will come once again. And I’m glad I found solace in Ascutney Mountain, which is made by the raw Jersey cow milk by the Cobb Hill community. Led by cheesemaker Sophie Starr, the team at Cobb Hill, “an intentional cohousing community” in Hartland, Vt., has created a cheese that’s hearty in texture but delicate in flavor. It’s aged anywhere from seven to 10 months, and I definitely could tell my wedge had been made with spring milk. I really dug the fruitiness, which made the cheese so sweet it was almost candy-like. Very appropriate, since I crave sugar when stressed or depressed. One nibble turned into two, then three, then oops! my entire slice was gone.

Ascutney Mountain’s crowd-pleasing flavor marries well with most wines, ales and lagers. I enjoyed mine with many glasses of sauvignon blanc this weekend. Next time I’ll try pairing it with my favorite sweet riesling to see if sweet-meets-sweet is too much or right on target. If you’ve had the opportunity to try this fantastic cheese, which pairings did you like best?

As a rule, Minnesotans like to tease Iowans about…well, everything. Their supposed lack of sophistication. Their abundance of pigs. The aroma that results from the abundance of pigs. But Prairie Breeze Cheddar gives Iowans an excuse to flip their northern neighbors the bird. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Cheddar this creamy and flavorful coming from the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

Prairie Breeze is one of three Milton Creamery cheeses made by the Musser family in Milton, Iowa, and it’s the one that heads north of the state border most frequently. The Mussers, a Mennonite family who relocated to Milton from Pennsylvania almost 20 years ago, collect milk from pasture-grazed cows living on other nearby Amish farms to craft their Alpine-style Cheddar. It’s a favorite of local cheesemongers (Ken Liss, formerly of Premier Cheese Market and now of Lake Wine and Spirits, introduced it to me a couple of years ago), and I can see why. Prairie Breeze fuses the body of a traditional Cheddar with the sweet, delicate flavor of an Alpine cheese. Perfect on top of a wheat cracker, the cheese also pairs well with Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon or a brown ale, according to my Heavy Table colleague John Garland, who interviewed the Mussers a couple of months ago.

Before “hiking the Appalachian Trail” became a euphorism for other illicit activities, it was better known as a scenic trek along the western edge of Virginia and beyond. It’s also the home of one of Virginia’s best known cheesemakers, Meadow Creek Dairy.

You’ve likely heard of Grayson, Meadow Creek’s lusty, pungent, yeasty take on Tallegio. Appalachian is a more unassuming cheese, made in the style of a traditional Alpine tomme. It’s a raw-milk cheese (from Jersey cows) aged at least 60 days in their cellars. It is dense with a hard natural rind, a yellow-tinged paste with a few holes, and a mild, lightly fruity taste. It’s a great cheese for snacking, alone or with a malty beer (try a Porter).

Like all good mountain cheeses, Appalachian is a seasonal specimen nearing the end of its annual run (June to March) — so head out to your local cheesemonger and snap some up.

Summer isn’t the season I typically think about Swiss cheeses – to me, they belong in a mid-winter fondue or on a snack plate when you’re cuddling in front of a fire. But there is a Swiss for all seasons, and I found the one perfect for warm-weather days: Challerhocker.

Challer what? I don’t blame you for asking – I had never heard of this cheese until it appeared at the Cheese Shop at France 44 a couple of months ago. (The name means “sitting in the cellar,” according to Cowgirl Creamery.) It’s produced by Walter Rass, the maker of Appenzeller, which you may recognize from the Wine Spectator list. Like Appenzeller, Challerhocker is a washed-rind cow’s-milk cheese, but it’s smaller and aged longer (at least 10 months). In her post 19 months old, Colleen noted Appenzeller’s smooth texture, fruity flavor and spicy finish. While Challerhocker is likewise very silky, its flavor reminds me more of clean, fresh straw, with a slightly caramel-like and nutty finish. It doesn’t demand hearty accompaniments like cured meats or cornichons, though it would certainly pair well with those foods. Challerhocker would be just as pleasing with a chilled glass of white wine or, as Janet Fletcher suggests, sherry or Madeira, and a few crackers on the side.

As an interesting aside: Challerhocker also keeps in your refrigerator (well-wrapped in cheese paper, of course) exceedingly well. I bought a hunk back in June before I went dairy-free, and it was still delicious today when I nibbled it again.

Though my cheese drawer is chock full of cheeses from the Wine Spectator list, I recently made room for several off-list varieties for a Heavy Table story I was writing about Rochdale Farms cheeses. Made in Wisconsin from the milk of more than 325 Amish farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota, these cheeses have starting appearing in co-op dairy cases in the Twin Cities and elsewhere in the Upper Midwest. All are good, some are fantastic, so seek them out if you live here or will be visiting these parts!

Don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of Trugole before. I hadn’t, but now I’m glad I found it. This Alpine cheese is made in Italy’s Asiago region – ah! you say, I’ve heard of Asiago – but it’s nothing like the cheese you find on bagels at Bruegger’s. Instead, it has a creaminess typical of cheeses made from cows that roam rich pastures. Way better than those stale bagels.

Trugole is a raw-milk cheese that is aged and washed for at least two months, but it has no funkiness or yeastiness. In fact, the taste is so smooth and mild that you’d think I’d be bored with it a la last week’s experience with Morbier. But there’s something about that creaminess that keeps me coming back for more tastes. I can imagine Trugole melted over a rich, brothy soup like French onion or draped over a piece of nutty toast alongside a mug of tomato soup. Suggested wine pairings are Pinot Grigio and Pinot Bianco, but to me, this cheese tastes so pure and basic, I’d skip the wine and focus on food pairings instead.

The first in a series of tasting notes from our New York Summer ’09 Cheese Tour. We made a quick stop in Brooklyn the day before, but our real day of cheese grazing (#chzday09) began Sunday morning at Artisanal Bistro in Midtown. As this was our first joint cheese expedition in NY, we started by visiting the classic landmarks. We got some great tips from new friends for our next visit, and the day culminated in a truly inspired dinner at a new favorite spot. You’ll have to stay tuned for that review, however.

Back to our brunch. I had been to this original Artisanal bistro several years ago, and while we were tempted to check out the newer Bar Artisanal we decided to stick with the classic this time. While the food was satisfactory, the overall experience was underwhelming. The service was indifferent at best, and the cheeses were well-cared for but served naked and forlorn on a stark white plate.

We opted for the seasonal cheese plate and received two traditional European cheeses, Pierre Robert (France) and Monte Enebro (Spain), and one from our list, Thistle Hill Farm’s Tarentaise of Vermont. Of course we couldn’t resist peaking in to the well-lit cheese cave, where you can actually reserve a table to dine in the midst of the cheese. The cheese counter had a nice array of cheeses available for purchase. 

Thistle Hill Farm is an organic-certified small family farm in North Pomfret, Vermont. They use raw, organic milk from their herd of grassfed Jersey cows as the base for this Alpine-style cheese. Check out their website for the full story of their cheesemaking education. They use a custom-made Swiss copper vat and cultures imported from France in their labor-intensive process. The curds are scooped by hand, pressed and molded and then aged four to six months in an aging room used solely for this cheese. The finished cheese is very smooth, golden in color and meaty but sweet. It has a soft, full-bodied flavor with notes of sweet hay. You’ll notice just a few of those crystals found in true Alpine cheeses (like Appenzeller). We found it too sweet for our brunch cocktails, but would suggest a medium-bodied red wine. 

Next stop: Murray’s.

Since Jill is our resident Wisconsin expert, I’m working on becoming the Vermont cheese guru — as several Vermont cheesemakers are represented on the Wine Spectator list, and they seem to be more readily available in DC area cheese shops than in the Midwest. (One of these days I’ll actually get up there myself, but in the meantime you can join me in living vicariously through Cookography‘s Vermont cheese tour. ) If you do spot Vermont’s fine cheeses in your local shops, definitely give them a try. The crisp Vermont air adds something to our East Coast dairy state’s milk that you generally only find in Europe’s Alpine cheeses. This week’s Vermont Ayr is a fine example.

This semi-hard aged cheese has the sweet, musty aroma of ripe pineapple, and the sweetness is evident in the flavor as well. The Crawford Family Farm’s small herd of heritage-breed Ayrshire cows – meet a few of their cows on the website – graze on a blend of clover and alfalfa, and produce a high quality, high butterfat (and rBST-free) raw milk used solely for their signature cheese, Vermont Ayr. The Crawfords, three siblings who took up cheesemaking to save the family dairy farm, carefully choose only the highest quality milk from a select few of the cows for each batch of Vermont Ayr. The curds are cave-aged three months, resulting in a sweet, slightly nutty, smooth cheese. Delicious on its own, or with a crisp Riesling that balances the cheese’s sweet notes.

I understand the FDA has a purpose, and a very important one at that, but it does stand in the cheese lover’s way sometimes. It prohibits those delectable, young raw-milk cheeses from entering our fair country, so Americans have to travel abroad to taste some of the very finest cheeses, like France’s Reblochon. I have no plans to travel to France anytime soon, so instead I’ll make do with Fleur des Alpes, a pasteurized version of the French classic, and then dream of the time Colleen and I can spend two weeks in France gorging on forbidden cheeses. (If anyone would like to fund said trip, please contact us immediately.)

Hailing from the lush Savoie region of France, Fleur des Alpes is a nutty cow’s-milk cheese that’s easy to enjoy. Yes, it has that earthy, funky smell most washed-rind cheeses emanate, but that’s partly what makes it so good. That stinky-cheese smell usually signals to me that this cheese means business. After sitting at room temperature for an hour or two, Fleur des Alpes doesn’t develop a runny interior, but the toothy, even rubbery texture is still pleasing in the mouth. Paired with a hearty bread and some fruit, the cheese would be a satisfying snack before a hike – or a serious day of shopping.

As for wine pairings, Wine Spectator recommends a dry Riesling from Alsace or Austria. Steven Jenkins suggests a fruity red for its counterpart, Reblochon, so I assume one would also be suitable with Fleur des Alpes. The butteriness of the cheese might be too much when paired with a sweet wine. If you want to add a sweet note to your snack, choose fresh berries as an accompaniment.