Artisan cheese of the month: Crottin de Chavignol

First granted the prestigious AOC label of excellence in 1976, the Loire Valley’s crottin de Chavignol is made with whole goat’s milk and matured for at least ten days.

Its fat content is 32% and each small, roundish cheese weighs around 60g.

The cheese offers an infinite range of flavours and textures depending on the degree of ripeness, meaning you can find a version suited to your taste, from fresh and light to more mature and poky in flavour, or from soft to hard.

You can eat the whole cheese while it is young but the rind on older goat’s cheese tends to firm up. Very nice accompanied by a local Sancerre white wine.