New member spotlight: a Jura affineur joins us

Henri Dubois joined the federation on 15 January, which makes him three weeks old as a member and
about thirty years into the actual work. He owns and runs the maturation room at Fromagerie
Saint-Rémille in the Jura, and he is the first affineur-owner to join us from that side of the
Atlantic in some time.

We asked him the question we ask every new member: what is the thing you wish someone had told you
earlier? His answer was not about cheese. It was about the room.

"The cave is a piece of equipment and it needs maintaining"

"Everybody who starts maturing thinks the skill is in the cheese," he told us. "It is not, or not
only. The skill is in noticing that the room has changed before the cheese tells you."

His room sits around 11 degrees and holds relative humidity in the high eighties, which is
unremarkable for pressed styles and, he says, much harder to actually hold than the numbers
suggest. Airflow is the part he watches hardest. A dead corner and a draughty corner in the same
room will give you two different cheeses off the same make day, and by the time the rinds tell you
which is which you have lost weeks.

The rest of the practice is physical and stubbornly unautomatable. Wheels get brushed to knock
back surface mould and spread the useful flora evenly. Heavy wheels get turned by hand every few
days so moisture does not settle on one face and pull the shape out of true. He keeps a
handwritten log per batch — temperature, humidity, what he did, what the rind looked like — and
was mildly appalled that we asked whether it was digitised.

"The log is not for the auditor," he said. "The log is so that in eight months, when a wheel is
better than it should be, I can find out what I did."

He is also clear that his flora are not portable. The native population in a Jura room is not the
population in an alpine room two valleys away, which is why two cheeses made to nearly the same
recipe come out as recognisably different things. It is a good corrective to the idea that
affinage is a set of settings you can copy off a spreadsheet.

Why he joined, and what he wants from us

Two reasons, both practical.

The first is standards. He deals with buyers who ask him to put a maturation claim on a label and
then cannot tell him what the claim has to be able to survive. Aging and labelling standards are
squarely the Standards Committee's territory, and he has asked to be put in front of whoever will
listen. We have connected him.

The second is the market. The Europe–Japan economic partnership came into force last Friday, and
for a maker of pressed hard styles it is the most consequential thing to happen to his export
options in a decade — the near-30% duty on hard cheese begins a long phased walk to zero, and a
20,000-tonne quota opens on the fresh and soft side. He is realistic about it. "A quota is not a
customer," he said. "But it is a reason to go and look for one."

He will not be a fixture at our regional workshops, and he is upfront about it: the Jura is a long
way from most of our programme, and he intends to fly over once a year rather than pretend
otherwise. This year that trip is the Annual Conference in Madison in July, and he has said he is
happy to talk to anyone who wants to corner him about maturation rooms — which, given how many of
you are currently trying to make a converted shipping container behave, may be a queue.

If this is your problem too

Members working on maturation and cave environment have three obvious places to start. Maturation
Planning for Small Rooms is the one most of you want and the one that fills fastest. Humidity &
Airflow Control is the unglamorous prerequisite that will save you more cheese. Cave Management
goes deeper for anyone running more than one room or more than one style at a time.

For members who want the credential rather than the single course, the Advanced Affinage
Certificate is the route, and the Education Committee can walk you through the prerequisites
before you commit any money to it.

Welcome, Henri. Bring the log.

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