Charolais

Appearance & taste

Charolais has the shape of an upright, slightly bulging cylinder, like a small barrel. After the minimum ripening period it measures 6 to 7 cm in diameter at half height, is 7 to 8.5 cm high and weighs 250 to 310 g; this makes it large for a goat’s cheese. It contains at least 45 g of dry matter per 100 g of cheese.

The finely wrinkled rind of the young cheese is beige to ivory and covered mainly by Geotrichum. During ripening, blue patches can form, mainly from Penicillium, and it can turn bluish. The paste is firm, smooth and cream-coloured, with a soft, fine texture. The aroma is strong, with notes of grass, hay, fresh straw and mushrooms, hazelnut and butter.

Each cheese is sold with a label bearing the name “Charolais” and the EU symbol “AOP”. For direct sales on the farm or at the market, a sales sign is enough.

Production

The goats eat grass or hay that comes only from the area; feed from monocultures and annual crops is prohibited. At least 60 % of each farm’s forage area is permanent grassland or rotational pasture that has existed for more than four years. For at least 150 days a year the goats graze or are given fresh green fodder in the trough. Supplementary feed is limited to a third of the annual ration, and genetically modified plants are prohibited as feed and as crops on the farms.

The raw whole milk is not physically treated and is curdled with little rennet. The lactic acid bacteria preferably come from the whey of a previous batch. The curd is ladled into tall draining moulds with a large diameter. Salting and turning are done by hand; the handling during ripening spreads the natural microflora over the surface and gives the cheese its barrel shape. It ripens in a cool, damp place, which lets Geotrichum and sometimes Penicillium grow. Milk production, cheesemaking and ripening take place in the area.

Origin & history

The area is a hilly landscape around Charolles between the mountains of the Auvergne to the south and the Morvan to the north, 200 to 900 m high. The climate is cool and oceanic, with 750 to 900 mm of evenly spread rainfall and no summer drought. Acid, deep soils have formed on granite, clay and sand. The hedgerow landscape has been preserved, and around 90 % of the agricultural area is used for forage, compared with less than 50 % in France as a whole. Part of the east is a Natura 2000 site.

As early as the end of the 19th century, goat farming was of great importance in the department of Saône-et-Loire, with 40,000 goats in 1892. The cheese used to be closely linked to cattle farming: the women made it in a dairy next to the farmhouse, where they could keep topping up the curd for the large format. Because of its size and keeping quality it was in demand, in the 1950s for example among the workers of the coal basin, who bought it fresh and kept it in cheese cages, the “tsézires” or “chazères”. In the 1960s, specialised goat farmers without cattle joined them. Dealers collected the cheese from the farms and sold it in Lyon and Roanne; in the 1970s it increasingly reached the big markets of Paris.