The Cheese That Takes 36 Months
Comté is made the same way it has been for centuries: village dairies called fruitières collect milk from local Montbéliarde cows, make young wheels, and hand them to an affineur — an ageing house — to do the slow part. The most famous of these is Fort des Rousses, a former military fort in the Jura where thousands of wheels sit in cool stone galleries.
Ageing is not just waiting. Wheels are turned, rubbed with brine, tapped and listened to. Most Comté is sold at twelve to eighteen months, and most wheels should be — only the structurally best, most promising cheeses are selected to go three years. That selection is the first reason the old stuff costs more: it's a graduating class, not a warehouse.
The second reason is simple economics. A wheel ageing for 36 months occupies rent-paying space for three years, loses moisture — and therefore saleable weight — the whole time, and carries the risk that it simply doesn't turn out. You pay for the survivors and the casualties both.
What you get for it is a different food. Young Comté tastes of fresh butter and hazelnut. At 36 months the flavour has moved somewhere between broth, roasted nuts, spice and caramel, and the texture has developed the crunch of tyrosine crystals — little white flecks that are a genuine marker of long ageing, not added salt.
Our advice: buy 250 grams, let it come fully to room temperature, and eat it on its own before you put it near bread. At £59 a kilo it sounds extravagant. At £3.70 for a generous portion of one of the best things a cow has ever been involved in, it's arguably the cheapest luxury on this site.
