meeting with those who perpetuate this AOP cheese

Born from a collapse, he grew up in the shadows of the bowels of the earth and built a reputation that extends beyond our borders. Certainly, in the 1st century, the Roman Pliny the Elder already mentioned a blue cheese from Gévaudan, but no official birth certificate of Roquefort exists.

So men created a legend. She says that a young shepherd forgot a bag containing bread and sheep’s curd in a cave on the Combalou plateau. When he returned, the bread had turned green, the cheese had veins of blue. Hungry, he tasted… and enjoyed it. Chance had worked, or rather a mushroom, Penicillium roqueforti, whose spores populate the limestone faults of the site.

Roquefort results from the osmosis between a landscape, an air full of history and a milk with multiple promises. A treasure that needed to be protected. On August 31, 1666, the parliament of Toulouse decreed that only cheeses matured in the cellars of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon were authentic; a protection that will be ratified by the appellation of origin in 1925.

Today, Roquefort represents a real economy: 2,640 breeders, 2,000 direct jobs. Long before the notions of “short circuits”, “eating well” or “landscape preservation” became fashionable, its actors were already practicing them. Finally, tasting this cheese means defending the complexity, the character, the singularity. From then on, Roquefort became a symbol: that of resistance to the blandness of the times.