Last week, CILFA students attended a Savoie wine and cheese tasting at their teacher Frédéric’s house.
We started by talking about the French cheeses the students were familiar with. They knew quite a few! We marked them on a map of France that doubles as a cheese platter. We got plenty of practice with French as a foreign language because we also talked about local specialties: raclette, fondue, and tartiflette. Do you know them all?
Next, we tasted some red wines from Savoie: a Gamay and a Mondeuse, which is a grape variety typical of Savoie. The students carefully followed the three steps of a proper wine tasting: observing the wine’s color, smelling it, and then tasting it! There was also Evian water and fruit juice from the region.
Finally, we tasted six cheeses with fresh baguettes from the neighborhood bakery: Emmental de Savoie, Tome des Bauges, Beaufort, Chevrotin, farmhouse Reblochon, and garlic-flavored Bornin.
Five of them have AOP (Protected Designation of Origin) status: Abondance, Beaufort, Chevrotin, Reblochon, and Tome des Bauges.
Three of them have PGI (Protected Geographical Indication) status: Emmental de Savoie, Raclette de Savoie, and Tomme de Savoie.
We talked a lot about cheese and finished the tasting with some delicious strawberries.
Here are a few quotes:
“As long as you’re not a piece of cheese, age doesn’t matter.” Jean-Loup Chiflet
“Cheese. The adult stage of milk.” Richard Condon
“A dessert without cheese is a beauty missing an eye.” — Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
“Cheese is the finishing touch to a good meal and the complement to a bad one.” Eugène Briffault
“How do you expect to govern a country where there are 258 varieties of cheese?” Charles de Gaulle
To learn more:
http://www.fromagesdesavoie.fr/fr/
Another post on the CILFA blog about a past tasting: https://www.tezdev.cilfa.fr/cilfa-degustation-fromages-professionnel/
A look back in photos at the tasting on April 18 :
