VAUD

It’s 7am on a Sunday, and I’ve not had the gentlest of wake-up calls from Swiss farmer Colin Rayroud. Some hours ago, at dawn, I’d woken and climbed down from my berth in the hayloft to milk the cow. Now, having emptied the buckets into a steaming vat in a dimly-lit, wood-panelled kitchen, it feels like I’ve stumbled into a medieval sauna — albeit one that reeks of milk.

Through the swirl of steam in the dimly lit, wood-lined kitchen, I admire the bright, shiny sides of a 640-litre copper pot hanging over the open wood fire. “This is at least 40 years old,” Colin says of the cauldron sloshing with milk. “My father and grandfather both used it; I learnt everything I know about l’étivaz cheese from them.”

Since 2005, my host has been making this hard cheese here in the Rougemont area of Vaud during the short cheesemaking season, when the