In the Swiss Alps, Gruyère Cheese Is a Way of Life

Lyre-shaped blades sweep through just-cultured milk that’s been coagulated with rennet to the consistency of pudding. The sharp strings cut the curd. Cheesemaker Nicolas Schmoutz encourages visitors to plunge carefully washed hands into the vat, avoiding the treacherous mechanism, called a tranche-caillé.

Once the curd is finely diced, Schmoutz pumps the vat’s contents into round molds, which are pressed by hydraulic force, whey streaming out. In another room, new wheels soak overnight in a salt bath. This dairy is 15 years old, and the bath water has never been changed. “We keep it clean but not sterilized,” says Schmoutz. “There are microbes in there we need for the rind and the taste.”

Outside, Fromagerie de Mézières is ringed in meadow. Forty farmers supply this dairy, hauling milk here twice a day. By law, none can come from farther than 12.4 miles. It is early fall in Switzerland’s Fribourg canton, the heart of the Gruyère appellation d'origine protégée, or AOP, and already there’s fresh snow on mountaintops. But the foothills remain verdant, clanking with the bells strapped around the necks of free-roaming cows.

For farmers, this is a busy time of year. It is calving season. In the town of Bière, an hour’s drive west of Fromagerie de Mézières, Nicolas Jotterand oversees a herd of Holsteins. A cow gives birth in a straw-covered stall in his cavernous barn. The newborn wobbles up onto untested legs. “The baby will get milk first, then fresh hay. After one year, in the spring, it will go to the mountains, ranging free so it doesn’t eat the same thing all the time,” Jotterand says. “It’s not one thing that accounts for the quality of the milk, but all of them. In the mountains, there is no cultivated grass, just a biodiversity of wild plants.”

That is the edible carpet that fuels Gruyère’s raw material. Nearly 16 times smaller in area than neighboring France, Switzerland is a tiny country. Yet, it produces 700 different cheeses. Only twelve of them are protected by an AOP. Americans may think of Swiss cheese as full of holes, but unlike Emmentaler, another AOP cheese, Gruyère is essentially solid. Its high water content—more than 34%—makes it eminently meltable. Gruyère’s greatest achievement is fondue.

Grassy and sweet when young, the cheese grows pungent as it ages. An eight-month-old Gruyère is mellow with a caramel aroma. At ten months, it is lemony and more intense. After 18 months, the cheese is sharper and drier. It tastes of barnyard, hazelnuts, flowers. Made with raw milk, these wheels are different from American knock-offs also called Gruyère. In the 1800s, Swiss immigrants brought the style to the US, where courts allow “Gruyère” to be used generically. Yet, there is nothing generic about Switzerland’s Le Gruyère AOP. This cheese floors you with flavor.

So do dishes made with it. At La Maison du Gruyère, the AOP’s visitor center beneath the namesake village of Gruyères, where the cheese has been produced since the year 1115, there is a shop, a demonstration fromagerie, and a restaurant. Deep-fried Gruyère beignets; macaronis de chalet, blanketed in Gruyère and carmelized onions; croûte, an open-faced Croque Madame, the bread soaked first in Chasselas, the local white wine; rösti, the potato pancake topped with bacon and oozy Gruyère—All are on offer to sate cheese-craving appetites.

It is advisable to walk off a meal there with a hike up the hill to Gruyère’s namesake, the nearby Medieval town at the base of Moléson, a jagged peak streaked with ski runs. Not much more than a cobblestone plaza lined with restaurants offering potato-and-cheese soupe de chalet, Gruyères is dominated by a 13th-century castle, where tours are on offer. The last name of one of the guides is Meule, which translates, he says, to “wheel of cheese.”

In this Swiss Alpine region, the affineurs’ caves are filled with Meule’s namesakes. Like négociants in Champagne, these “refiners” buy cheese from fromageries, aging it before shipping it around the world. Mifroma’s cave is bored 624 feet into a sandstone mountainside. Wheels stamped “Le Gruyère AOP” are stacked on spruce shelving 34 cheeses high. A boxy robot roams the rows, raising steel arms to pull wheels down, flip them, weigh them, and wash them in brine. It’s muggy in here, the natural humidity at 95 percent. It reeks of off-gassed ammonia.

Cheese master Jean-Charles Michaud tests wheels with his sonde, a cowhorn hammer with a corer for a handle. He taps one, listening to its music. If it sounds hollow, there’s a hole. No good. He tastes. If not perfect, the cheese will be relegated to products other than fresh-cut wheels. There’s a heck of a lot of Gruyère to vouch for; Mifroma ripens nearly 10,000 tons a year. A worker walks by in rappelling gear.

Yet, not all affineurs are of such a size. A farmer, cheesemaker, and affineur at once, Martial Rod is the proprietor of La Moësettaz, an alpage, or mountain pasture, in Le Brassus. The tiny, family operation is the opposite of Mifroma’s. The 57 traditional alpages like Rod’s produce less than 2 percent of the AOP cheese, but their craft is the most impressive. At the chalet where he lives and works, commemorative cowbells dangle from the eaves. Rod stirs a vat of curds and whey heated by glowing embers. It is frigid outside, but the fire overheats the tiny fromagerie. Beneath his leather apron, Rod wears a tank top. His arms are ripped from lifting 77-pound wheels.

“My father was a cheesemaker,” Rod says. “I, too, fell into the vat. I like my relationship with the animals and the work’s respect for nature.” He knows each of his 50 cows by name, and he controls the entire process. “The alpage is the definition of freedom.”

On a forest-lined meadow in the drizzle and fog, Rod’s cows luxuriate, their udders conjuring the milk that he will turn into the cheese that will eventually be melted into dishes like moitié-moitié, a winey fondue combining pungent Gruyère with a milder cheese, Vacherin, at rustic Swiss Alpine eateries, including Chez Boudji, a specialist of this dish in the town of Broc.

The bovines chew their cud nonchalantly. In a month or so, Rod will dress them in floral crowns and join other farmers in the désalpe, parading the herds from alpine pastures, down to the warmer plains for winter, as chalets on Moléson and across the region prep their fondue pots for the aprés-ski crowds.