What the AOC Demands of a Cheese

Beaufort is defined before it is made. The cahier des charges — the AOC specification's binding rule book — sets the wheel's diameter and weight within fixed limits, and its sides concave rather than straight, a shape called a talon that is specific to this cheese and no other. That concavity is not ornamental: it is the mark pressed in during the first days in the mould, and it identifies a Beaufort at a glance across the cellar floor.

The cellar itself is the working environment the AOC also specifies. Temperature is held between 10 and 14 degrees Celsius; humidity stays high. Affinage — the maturing period — runs a minimum of five months for standard Beaufort and a minimum of ten for Beaufort d'Alpage, the summer-milk version made on the high pasture. During that time each wheel is salted and turned by hand on a regular schedule — friction rubbing the rind into its characteristic grey-brown coat. A wheel at 40 kilograms, turned daily through the early weeks and then on alternating days, accumulates hundreds of individual handlings before it leaves the cellar. The labour is not incidental; it is encoded in the specification.

Turned and salted on pine. The shelf is written into the specification.

Photo: Mark Stebnicki / Pexels

The Coopérative Laitière du Beaufortain, based in Beaufort-sur-Doron, is the principal producer and the institution that holds the production record together. In 2022, the cooperative processed milk — collected from herds grazing the Beaufortain, Tarentaise and Maurienne — and produced approximately 530,000 kilograms of Beaufort, a figure that the cooperative's own published accounts make available. At an average wheel weight of around 40 kilograms, that represents something in the order of 13,000 wheels a year, many of them maturing together in the cellars at any given point in the cycle.

The AOC area includes the high alpages — summer pastures where cows graze above 1,500 metres — and the specification requires that Beaufort d'Alpage be made on location, with the milk of a single herd, during the transhumance season. This is the condition that keeps the ageing calendar tied to the mountain calendar: milk gathered at altitude in July becomes a wheel in the cellar by August and cannot leave as a finished cheese until late winter at the earliest. Geography, livestock movement and chemistry are each written into the same document. The wheel's dimensions are the last of many specifications, not the first.