By Barry Neild, CNN
(CNN) — What were you doing two years ago? Perhaps you voted in a pivotal election, or sang your heart out to the newly released movie “Wicked” at the cinema. Maybe you placed a wheel of cheese onto a cellar shelf in the Jura Mountains of eastern France … and waited.
If it was the latter, then congratulations! That cheese could now be the best in the world, according to the judges of the prestigious World Cheese Awards, who gathered in Spain on Thursday to sample more than 5,000 varieties of dairy produce to crown a winner.
Despite a tight final round against heavyweight contenders from Italy, Switzerland and Spain, the ultimate champion was a 24-month-aged Comté — a nutty, crumbly and deeply complex creation from France’s eastern border.
“It is the complexity, obviously,” said Spanish expert Rafael Domínguez González — one of 14 super judges who each championed one cheese into the tense final round of the competition — of his chosen offering.
“We see how it evolves in the mouth. It starts to develop in different layers of flavor, beautiful nutty layers. It definitely left a mark here.”
The winning Comté, a hard cheese made from unpasteurized cow’s milk in the Franche-Comté region bordering Switzerland, was aged at Fort des Rousses by JuraFlore, a traditional family-run affineur (cheese maturer) founded in 1907.
“It’s such a pleasure,” Franck Arnaud, a descendant of JuraFlore’s original founder, told the award ceremony via videolink. “We have 120 years next year and a family business all this time. It’s an amazing pleasure for me, this news, and I can’t wait to tell the others.”
‘I love this cheese’
After crossing the Pyrenees to arrive in the Spanish city of Córdoba, where this year’s awards were held, the winning wheel faced a much tougher journey through multiple judging rounds before reaching the final 14.
A grand total of 5,330 cheeses from 45 countries made it to the competition hall, where they were laid out on a series of tables and assessed by an army of judges for taste, smell, appearance, texture and mouthfeel. “Super gold” prize winners from each table advanced to a second round of sampling before a live onstage tasting session picked the champion.
It was close, though. With the 14 final judges each giving marks out of seven, the winning Comté finished neck-and-neck on 81 points alongside a Swiss mountain cheese — described as a “big, big boy” by cheese writer and event host Patrick McGuigan — and a younger French ewe’s-milk cheese. The Comté triumphed on a tie-breaker because it had the smallest range of scores.
McGuigan said the winning cheese was greatly aided by its maturity, particularly when it came to its appetizing appearance. “You can see the color, that dark, dark golden color. That’s coming from time, basically,” he said in his onstage assessment.
“Some people argue that time is the fifth ingredient in cheese. You’ve got your milk, your starter cultures, your rennet, your salt. But time can play a huge part in developing flavor. To me, that talks of summer pastures, that really golden color, cows eating grass…”
While raw-milk cheeses face strict import rules in countries such as the United States over health concerns, aged varieties like Comté easily clear the FDA’s 60-day maturation requirement. Still, given that each wheel takes two years to produce, American cheese aficionados will have to move quickly to secure a slice of the winning batch before supplies run out.
Those who manage should be in for a treat, according to judge Domínguez González.
“I love my friends … I love my girlfriend, and I knew I love this cheese,” he said. “I’m very happy.”
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