Cheese of the month February 2015: Huguenot from Dalewood Fromage, Franschhoek/South Africa

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This cheese is for all those who keep complaining about the supposedly unbearable grey of Berlin’s weather during these first months of the year. You’re starting to sound a little boring – is there no sun in your hearts? Your wine glasses? Apparently not, and I therefore present you with some on the cheeseboard…

Huguenot crunches and crumbles and caramels on and over the tongue in one big wave of pleasure; it combines mature-gouda-Holland with real-cheddar-England and yet is full of his very own character. Fritz Lloyd Blomeyer, Berlin’s coolest cheese dealer, brought back a generous chunk of that one year old wheel (and handed it over to me in a kind of clandestine night time meeting in a dark Kreuzberg bar – where others might be expecting a different kind of drugs).

Where from? Directly from Franschhoek, the French Huguenot corner of South Africa. I remember from my visits there (way too long ago) how impossibly beautiful that landscape is and how delicious the wines can be. Cheese however back then didn’t really exist in any meaningful way. Things are changing: now Petrina and Rob Visser make a wide selection of different types of cheese at their Dalewood farm, where their Jersey herd is grazing surrounded by vineyards. Culture cheese magazine reported on them (and other South African cheese makers) back in 2012. I’m glad there is now a real HeinzelCheese excuse to return to the Cape, to the sun… But first I’ll get a bottle of Pinotage from the cellar, to go with the Huguenot. Did I hear that word grey yet again?

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