This is why my recent visit to Beaufort, in the Haute-Savoie region of France, so impressed me.  While only about 8 percent of yearly Beaufort cheese production qualifies as “alpage,” or in other words, made in the summertime from the milk of a closed herd, eating grass and wildflowers on pastures more than 1500 meters high, most of the valley’s cooperatives take incredible care in sourcing milk from small alpage producers, and what technology they have has been carefully developed with an eye towards maintaining traditions rather than forgoing them.  The cheesemakers in the cooperatives use their own whey to mix their starter bacteria and extract their rennet from a dried calf’s stomach. They prefer to make cheese in eight human-scale vats rather than a single huge one, and many of the cheeses are still turned and salted by hand. 

These are details only a cheese nerd cares about, but the point is they amount to a commitment that privileges authenticity and quality over convenience and short-term profit. While AOCs may not all be worth trusting, Beaufort’s is, and its reputation (and superior flavor) guarantees a price that keeps the region’s farmers and cheesemakers in business, the whole reason for AOCs in the first place.  Here at least, they got it right.