Cheesy Christmas 11: Mini Coeur Pommeau

Like yesterday’s cheese, Abondance, today’s mini coeur (mini-heart) cheese is one that we had last year.

In fact, not only was it the first cheese that we had last year as part of our Cheesy Christmas 2020, but it scored high with a 4.5/5 and comments like “there’s a taste of cider” and “it melts in your mouth”.

Like Day 10’s Abondance… we had high expectations.

A Confession to Begin With

Those who have been regularly following the Cheesy Christmas posts will have noticed an interruption. No, you haven’t had too much egg nog, there was an interruption in posts.

On the actual Day 11, we were away for the day and, upon our return, I had to go house-sitting for a friend overnight. We ended up missing cheese that night and that set us on a downward spiral that lasted several days, to the point where Thursday (Day 16) we ended up having a small platter of cheese to taste, in order to catch up.

No problem right… isn’t that what the rich people do? They have a sampling platter. (Let me just say that this cheese platter looked a LOT different from the cheese trays we’d see growing up. Let’s just say… much less choice of cheese in Atlantic Canada in the 1970s)

So… while I’m still publishing them in order, the actual sampling took place a couple days later and I’m writing about it a couple of days after that.

Day #11: Mini Coeur Pommeau

Name: Mini Coeur Pommeau
It’s named this because during the ripening period, it’s bathed in Pommeau, a type of apple cider (cider production is very much associated with northern France). The apple-smell was evident from the first whiff and very much drew us in.
Region: André Facchetti, a cheesemaker in Northern France, was the first to ripen cheese like this, with Pommeau and is credited on the packaging, even though it came to us from the dairy in Grenoble, south-east of Lyon.
Milk: Raw Cow milk
Our Score: 2.9/5
Well I don’t know what happened to this little cheese between last year and this, but it did NOT do it for us this year. The taste was much stronger than we remember last year’s version being and there were lots of grimaces around the table. It left an almost spicy-tingling in the back of the mouth & throat afterward. Dear, oh dear… this was a let-down (likely not helped by the fact that we’d had high expectations based on last year’s score).