COMTÉ & CÔTES DU RHÔNE
A good-sized wedge of the great French cheese, Comté, properly cut for individual service, alongside a tumbler of Côtes du Rhône rouge—a fine accompaniment and, the two of them together, a happy pairing.
In Switzerland, some years ago, I remember seeing a sign at a rivulet that read “Ici commence Le Rhône” (“The River Rhône begins here.”) Downstream, that river feeds many things, among them (by a slight geographical stretch) the great cheese Comté, as well as, of course, many vines and their wines.
The cheese and the wines therefore have the same parent, as it were, and also taste terrific as a pair. Note (above) how to cut a segment of the cheese so that you will taste—and enjoy tasting—the soft center, the maturing flesh, and even the rind that, for many months, both has faced the world and taken it into itself. [More on tasting wine & cheese together here.]
Comté, like Gruyère and Beaufort, other “Alpine” cheeses to which it is related, is a cooked-curd, pressed, and hard-aged cheese. It weighs in at an astonishing 90-pound wheel, when all is aged and done, 3-5 inches thick and 25 inches (or more) across. In days gone by—before transport or shipping trucks plied roadways that zig-zagged throughout the Alps—these wheels were rolled down the Alpine mountainsides to market as, well, wheels.
The forms were functions of how the cheeses needed to be made. Come late spring, dairymen herded the cows whose milk went to make Comté up into the hills of the Jura Mountains surrounding their villages so that the herd could forage during the summertime in cooler meadows and pastureland than that they would obtain at valley floors and lower elevations.
But what to do with all that milk each day, far away from the dairy and its cheesemaking? (The average Montbéliards cow—that whose milk makes Comté cheese—gives around 4 gallons of milk a day; multiply that by many dozens of heifers . . .) Well, make the cheese in situ, “up there” in the hills alive with not only the sounds of music but also the mooing of hundreds of cows.
And that explains the size of Comté: Cram as much milk into one space as possible before it gets just too unwieldy to manage handily. Or as a big wheel that you could roll down the mountainside after it had aged firmly and come time, in early autumn, to return the herd to its stables in town for overwintering.
As with many firm, hard-aged Alpine cheeses such as Gruyère, Comté tastes of a range of fruity, nutty, and toasty aromas and flavors. Sometimes you’ll taste butter, other times browned butter. Nut flavors include everything from almond to hazelnut. Older Comté might taste of grilled or confited onion.