The other day I heard Noella Marcellino interviewed on NPR. Noella is a Benedictine nun with a Ph.D. in Fungi or cheese mold. You might think that the mold in Camembert is all the same and the cheese in the Auvergne is all the same, but, in fact, the mold in cheese cellars just 500 feet distant from each other is different. Each cellar has it’s own different combination of cheese mold and thus produces cheese with a strange flavor. European caves have been accumulating these organisms for hundred of years. Perhaps

that is why they have such intense and rare flavors. De Gaulle complained, ‘how can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six kinds of cheese. Cheese cellars are diverse microclimates. that is real terroir. Of course, whether the cheese is inoculated with a commercial culture, that diversity is lost. Have we ignored a major source of terroir in the wine world? How many winemakers ferment with the natural wild yeast of their terroir? What is lost with an inoculation of commercial yeast?

Original post by SeattleWineBlog