The name's unpronounceable, but my goodness the cheese is easy to get your mouth around. One of the highlights of my working life is getting to go to Paris's Salon de Fromages every two years. It's a glorious trade fair of all that is best in the French cheese world. It attracts a huge cross-section of French cheesemakers, from large creameries to independent fermiers, and there's always something new to discover.

Hyelzas is a tiny village of around 50 inhabitants situated just outside Cevennes national park. It's home to a small Fromagerie specialising in making sheep's milk cheeses from the many nearby herds.

This year, they've been experimenting with some new cheeses. Which they've saddled with some of the hardest-to-pronounce-if-you're-a-clodhopping-monolingual-Englishman names I've ever come across. Le Sounal de Hyelzas and Claousou de Hyelzas do anything but trip off your tongue, but saying the name isn't really the point. The point is eating the cheese, and it is extraordinary. 

Both cheeses are made in a similar style to a Vacherin Mont d'Or, so they're soft, unctuous little numbers, bound in birch bark and washed in brine as they mature. The cheese is fabulous: a sweet, nutty flavour with a resinous edge given it by the bark. Unlike Mont d'Or, the bark isn't fastened by metal staples, but by tiny wooden pegs. Both cheeses are beautiful - the Sounal is a large, cutting cheese, while the Claousou is a small, shoe-shaped cheese.

It's not very often in the cheese world that something entirely new happens, and it's even rarer that we're there at the very start, but we've managed it in this case. The first cheeses were made in March, and they first went on sale in early April. And as far as we know, if you want some, you'll have to come to Chiswick, because we're the very first people in the country to have it. And you know, you really should.

The evenings might be darker, the days shorter and the weather colder, but there are some compensations to the onset of winter. I get to wear more flattering clothes again, I can make more casseroles, and I get to spoon melted cheese from a box onto potatoes and pretend it’s dinner.

Yep, Vacherin Mont d’Or is back.

Actually, the name’s a bit misleading. The name Vacherin has been the source of a vicious turf war (or something) between France and Switzerland for decades. Both make a similar cheese, so both claim the right to the name. The outcome of the eventual entente between the two nations was that the Swiss got to call their cheese Vacherin, while the French would call it Mont d’Or.

Pretty unfair, if you ask me, since the French cheese was almost certainly the original, but them’s the breaks.

Anyway, whichever side of the border you get it from, the cheeses are very similar. A soft, oozy interior, covered by an undulating reddish-tinged rind, all held in place with a belt made of spruce bark. They’re stored and matured in a pine box, which, if you’re so inclined, you can put straight into a moderate oven, and bake for about half an hour for a luxurious instant fondue. Spooned over potatoes, cornichons and bacon, it’s a fantastic winter treat – the sort of food it almost makes it worth going skiing for.

It’s also one of the only truly seasonal cheeses. The terms of its AOC stipulate that it can only be made between August and March, using winter milk. The reasons for this are purely historical. This area of the Alps traditionally practices transhumance – farmers will keep their cows indoors in winter, then take them up to the high mountain pastures in summer, where they can graze on fresh grass and mountain herbs for four months of the year. During this time, milk yields go up enormously, which isn’t exactly ideal, since getting fresh milk off a mountain in good time to take it to market is tricky, to say the least. So farmers need to make a big cheese – big enough to use up all that fabulous milk their cows are producing. So they make Comté, one wheel of which is big enough to accommodate a day’s milking for an average size herd.

But in the winter, the cows’ yield goes down, so the farmers need to make a smaller cheese. Since they’re in the valleys, it doesn’t need to be so robust or mature, so they make a soft, reasonably quick to ripen cheese like a Mont d’Or. Exactly like a Mont d’Or, in fact.

So a Mont d’Or is only made in winter, and, since it doesn’t keep for very long, is only eaten in winter. And its arrival and its leaving are as fine a marker point for the changing of the seasons as you could possibly want.

 OK, hands up who knows anything about Swiss wine? Nobody? I can’t see any hands, so I’m going to take it that you know as little as I did about Swiss wines before we teamed up with our partners, Harrison’s. Harrison’s is one of London’s leading importers of Swiss wines, a speciality they have developed for over twenty years.

So we’re looking forward to this weekend, when Doug Harrison will join us on Friday and Saturday with samples of at least six Swiss wines, white and red, all available to buy. We’ve pushed the boat out and got ourselves a temporary licence so we can sell booze, for once. And news like that is worth celebrating, I think.

We’ve got the wine, and we’ve got the cheese to go with it. We’re very proud of our range of Swiss mountain cheeses, sourced from small co-operatives and dairies. So proud, in fact, that we want you all to share it. We’re giving away – yes, GIVING AWAY – a free piece of 18 month old Gruyere Alpage with every bottle of Swiss wine we sell. I know.

We’re giving away the good stuff here. Gruyere Alpage is made only with summer milk, when the cows are feeding from the high pastures in the Alps, in fields rich in herbs and wild flowers. You can only imagine what a diet like that does for the flavour of their milk.

The resulting cheese is then matured for over a year – ours will be at least 14 months old when we receive it – so it will have developed deep nutty, savoury flavours and an aroma that I put down to the herby content in the milk. No-one’s contradicted me yet, so let’s say that’s what it is. It’s wonderful stuff. And, as in so many cases, the ideal wine to go with it is made not far away. A crisp, slightly effervescent Fendant would go down a treat with this, one of the world’s great hard cheeses.

We’ll be tasting Swiss wines on Friday 23 and Saturday 24 September between 11am and 5pm. And the following week, on Friday 30 September and Saturday 1 October, we’ll do it all again at Harrison’s in Ealing. We look forward to seeing you there.

Details:

Swiss wine tasting

11am-5pm

Friday 23 and Saturday 24 September:

Mortimer & Bennett

33 Turnham Green Terrace

Chiswick

London

W4 1RG

Tel: 0208 995 4145

11am-5pm

Friday 30 September and Saturday 1 October

Harrison’s

60 Pitshanger Lane

Ealing

W5 1QY

Tel: 0208 998 7866

We’ve been thinking a lot about cheese recently. Well, when don’t we? But we’re getting to that stage of the year when we’re planning our Christmas cheeses, so we have to start thinking not only about which cheeses to buy for Christmas, but how much?

It’s not easy. Unless you’ve experienced the pandemonium at Mortimer & Bennett at Chiswick, it’s hard to visualize just how much we sell in the final few days running up to Christmas. People walking out with whole full-sized Stiltons, entire Bries de Meaux, huge chunks of cheddar. It’s a sight to behold. At least it is from my vantage point, safely protected by a large fridge. I wouldn’t want to be on your side of the counter – it’s mayhem.

So you have my sympathy. And if you’re going to go through that to make sure you have the best cheeses you can get hold of at Christmas, it’s our responsibility to make sure that you get just that: the cheeses you want, in the best condition they can be.

So we have to start planning now. First on the list is our three-year-old Comte from Fort St Antoine. Every year, Marcel Petite selects a few of his cheeses to mature on to this venerable age. Each of these cheeses has to be perfect: there must be no blemish, crack or mark on the rind, or the cheese will not survive the lengthy maturation. Generally, only about thirty make it to the final stage.

And we’ve got two of them.

If you’re a fan of the caramel sweetness of a classic Comte, imagine a drier, richer, more intense version of it, then double it. At least. It’s no surprise that we start taking orders for it from about the end of November. With a tawny port and a handful of nuts, it makes Christmas for me. I can live without the turkey. Without the Comte, I’d wonder if the rest of the season was worth the bother.

We’ll open the order book in late November, and we’ll be taking orders up to December 15. After that, you’ll have to join the scrum.