Cheese Journeys: Perfect Way to Discover France’s Cheesemaking Regions

If the key to one’s heart is through their stomach, the key to France is undoubtedly through its cheese — at least as far as Anna Juhl of Cheese Journeys is concerned. The native Iowan’s luxury travel company takes a unique approach, introducing cheese lovers to some of Europe’s most exciting, enticing cheese regions since its inception, in 2013.

No matter which Cheese Journeys itinerary you choose, Juhl’s values of education, relaxation, and conviviality shine through palpably. Guests stay in a hand-selected château or villa, pampered by a team of hosts that may include Juhl, long-time cheese pro and tour director Jilly Sitch, or author Tenaya Darlington, perhaps better known as ‘Madame Fromage’.

Talented professional chefs travel with the group, serving up local cuisine on-site… at least on days when lunch isn’t included in that day’s excursion, perhaps the crème de la crème of the offer.

• In Piedmont, guests explore the once-abandoned Italian ghost town revitalizing a nearly-lost mountain cheese.
• In England, they may explore the manor home of Britain’s foremost cheddar maker.
• And in France, they can delve deep into two of the country’s most beloved fromages: Comté and Brie

Brie is the closest thing Paris has to a local cheese, and this itinerary is the newest addition to the roster, joining the Cheese Journeys family just this year. Guests get a bit of both city and country on this tour, which juxtaposes days luxuriating in a 17th-century chateau overlooking the Seine, discovering the differences between local bloomy-rinded specialties, with afternoons getting a taste for the sheer variety of French cheeses available in the capital’s many cheese shops with help from expat experts.

The Alpine tour, meanwhile, affords visitors the opportunity to explore the bounty and landscapes of three closely linked but wholly distinct areas – Savoie, Jura, and Switzerland.

Over the course of this 11-day journey, not only do travelers get to know Comté, France’s best-selling and most-produced fromage by far, but they also get the chance to encounter lesser-known delicacies like Reblochon or Manigodine, a cheese made by just one producer and aged by artisan affineur Joseph Paccard.

The visit to this small local artisan is one of Juhl’s favorite stops on the trip.

I just have such a personal soft spot for the Alpine architecture and the terrain and the high Alps,” says Juhl, and Paccard, she says, is “just a gem of a guy.” “He really takes us into the caves, and we do a deep dive and try to understand what it’s like to work with these quality, small producers and what their mission is,” she says. “And we’re sitting up in the high Alps, you know, doing a tasting with him, and it’s just… paradise in every way.”

Juhl may be an expert on cheese travel now, but it was a long row to hoe.

Cheese Journeys Advises: retain your sense of humor

She recalls an early trip to France with her husband and daughters, scouting and visiting cheesemakers near Roquefort, a fairly rural area where few spoke English.

We needed lunch, we pull into this little village,” she recalls; they found a local café and ordered the plat du jour. “But it just kept coming and coming,” she recalls. “We’d had steak-frites; we’d had salad. We’d
had everything. The cheese course comes, and they bring a massive board of cheese, local
cheese, set it on the table, and you were expected to just cut from it, kind of like a cheese cart,
and then you give it back.”

Only Juhl and her family didn’t get the memo, operating under the assumption that whatever they left behind would surely be thrown away, rather than given to another table.

This is how narrow and foolish and American I was thinking,” she says. “Anything in an American restaurant that goes to a table gets thrown away, right? You can’t re-serve food that’s already been out to somebody else’s table and just give it to someone else. The health department would just go crazy.”

Rather than waste the bounty, she attempted to ask for a doggy bag — a suggestion the waitress did not take kindly to.

We get into this wrestling match where she is grabbing the cheese board out of our hands and screaming at us and slapping our hands,” she recalls. “Then she brings the owners over, and in front of all the local people, just chastises us and embarrasses us and screams at us, right? But this went on for like, about two minutes, this wrestling back and forth about the cheese.”

While she was, of course, mortified at the time, she recalls the story with laughter, now. And she encourages fellow travelers to do the same should they misstep on their adventures, whether with Cheese Journeys or solo.

Where are some people I know who say, you know, once that happens to you, they would never go again,” she says. “But I’m saying: Swallow your pride, humble yourself. Dig yourself out of that mess… and laugh about it!”

Of course, it’s far less likely for such snafus to occur on a Cheese Journey trip, seeing as Juhl and her team plan each itinerary down to meticulous detail.

Local knowledge creates unique experiences

Whether in Italy, England, or the Jura, she works closely with local ‘fixers’ to help facilitate relationship-building with artisan cheesemakers, mongers, and agers. One France-based ‘fixer’, for example, was the key to making that dream day in Manigod a reality.

She does a lot of behind-the-scenes work for me to try to find these remote places,” Juhl says, noting that despite having a long love affair with France – and even living part of the year in Strasbourg – relying on a local really makes a difference, especially with farmers who don’t have much time to spare.

I don’t speak French well enough to communicate with them, and so I literally send her out and she goes exploring,” she says of her fixer. “And she’s quirky. She’ll go sleep in the hayloft or in the back of her car. She’s one of those gals who just lives on the land. And… but she can build a trust with these people so that over time, then, they’re welcoming to me to bring a group of crazy Americans to talk about cheese.”

Of course, accessing locals is just part of the venture. Juhl must also serve as a cultural translator of sorts, bridging gaps for those for whom these jewels of French terroir are unfamiliar.

We had, people, on this last France tour who were Kraft American singles, chicken nuggets, and hamburger sort of people, you know?” she says. “And the cultural immersion for them, into this experience, was almost traumatizing, for them. And we had to say… you gotta roll with this. You gotta step out of your comfort zone and consider that the flavors and experiences that we’re gonna create for you are so worth it, and then just keep laughing, you know?”

Juhl’s good humor and, above all, her deep love of the product makes her a natural at bridging this gap.

One of the keys, when it’s related to cheese, is understanding the topography or the landscape of the region,” she says. “Sometimes, I sit with them early on, and we may pull out a really big map, and try to help them zero in and pull out what is specific to this region.”

In the Alps, for example, this may lead to conversations about hardier cattle breeds or the necessity of dry-cured and smoked charcuterie in a place where refrigeration was a luxury.

Connecting history and culture with why you see certain foods in certain regions, to me, is important,” she says.

What will 2024 bring for Cheese Journeys?

Juhl shows no signs of slowing down in her exploration of Europe’s cheese regions – and France, understandably, seems to offer many of her next frontiers. A Burgundy tour starring washed-rind Epoisses will join the roster in the fall of 2024, with Normandy and Alsace not far behind.

Each tour is unique in certain aspects, because we try to cherry-pick and tell the story of what’s unique about that area, but then the common thread of what we’re trying to accomplish is still the same,” she says. “But the mission, to me, has to stay the same, for the most part.”

This mission is clear to anyone who speaks with Juhl for more than a moment:

To ignite the same passion and zest for knowledge that got her on this path all those years ago, to incite curiosity, and to ensure that, in the minds of travelers, delicious cheese is never divorced from the hard-working individuals who crafted it.

Are you a lover of Fromage? Have you had a Cheese Journey experience, yet? Please share with us below.

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