Frohsinn, cheerfulness. Who’d not need a bit more of that?! This is my offering to you, as a guiding cheese for the year, so to say. Small, easy to handle, affordable, and with a distinctive character, yet balanced and relatively discreet. Not exactly widely available, but perhaps an incentive to go and look out for similar offerings from others, make a trip north, discover new places, people, cheeses.

As large, or small, as my hand, the soft cheese is made from raw cow’s milk at Hof Berg in Dannau. I don’t expect you to know that corner of northern Germany, but it’s beautiful, marvellously quiet, in so-called Holstein Switzerland, just 15 kilometres from the Baltic Sea. Hof Berg is Schleswig-Holstein’s oldest Bioland-certified farm, having been started in 1979 by Birgitta and Albert Teschemacher, and based on a very healthy mix of idealism and realism. After 30 years it was passed on, very successfully, to the next generation: since 2009 René Kohler is looking after it together with the Teschemacher’s son Falk. Besides the small, washed-rind Frohsinn there are several kinds of hard cheeses, a white bloomy rind cheese, fresh ones as well as gorgeous quark. However, for me the Frohsinn in particular confers the quiet resolution reigning high at Hof Berg: without any agitation and yet very focussed and fully convinced.

I am grateful for your constant, reliable company during the last year - here's to a new one. Don’t let anything and anybody drag you down – eat more cheerful cheese!