Almost two years old, dense and brittle, yet the very opposite of dry, the hard, crumbling density melting into a gorgeously fruit and caramel driven loveliness, both savory and sweet, cheese and dessert, like a rich rice pudding yet so much better… Cironé is quite a newcomer at cheese counters, but in its essence an ancient classic. A small number of dairy farmers in the small side valleys of the Emmental east of the Bern, around 1000 meter up, get their act together and bring the milk to a creamery (and no, I had no clue either where Zäziwil might be ;). There the raw milk is worked into hard round wheels of 6.5 kilograms (small in the Emmental context), matured in caves while being turned and washed regularly for several months.

But from that point on Cironé is different, because the good cheesemakers of Eyweid are teaming up with Jumi, founded back in 2005 by six cheese-crazies, bold free thinkers seizing the ample space freed up by the Swiss Cheese Union’s abolition. That had reduced cheese production to a small number of well-known varieties, whereas now anything is possible, as for instance shown by Willi Schmid in Toggenburg. “Notions such as tradition and creativity” the Jumi folks say, “are relative”. I couldn’t agree more. “It’s all been around before, what changes is just the point of view.”