Banon

What is Banon Cheese?

Small goat's cheeses have been made in the dry hills of Provence since Roman times. Banon as it is sold today was first made by a couple in the village of Puimichel, near the town of Banon in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. In July 2003 it became the first cheese from Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur to receive the Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée. The appellation covers 179 communes: 111 in Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, 33 in Hautes-Alpes, 21 in Drôme and 14 in Vaucluse.

The milk, the cheesemaking and the aging all have to happen inside the appellation area. Affinage runs for two weeks. The cheese is then dipped in eau de vie and wrapped in chestnut leaves that have been softened and sterilized by boiling in water and vinegar. Leaves must be harvested brown, so seasonal teams collect them during the autumn fall on the Albion Plateau, in the Cévennes, in Corsica and in Ardèche. The Fromagerie de Banon, which accounts for 60 percent of production, gets through 5 million leaves a year.

Ready to eat, Banon is a disc about 8 cm across and 2 to 3 cm high, weighing 100 g. Under the leaves and the raffia is a fine soft white pâte, uncooked and unpressed, with a pungent character. The cheese is at its best when made between spring and autumn.

Serve it on a slice of rustic country bread with cherry or fig jam. It goes with white wines from the Côtes-du-Rhône, Ventoux and Luberon. A young banon can also be turned into fromage fort du Mont Ventoux: sealed in an earthenware jar with salt and pepper, doused in vinegar and eau-de-vie, then left to ferment in a cool cellar, where the taste grows fiercer and keeps for years.

Output is small. Eighteen farm producers and two artisanal processors make roughly 75 tonnes a year, 80 percent from dairies and 20 percent from farms, which makes this one of the rarest AOCs in France by volume. Since 1993 the village of Banon has held a festival for its goat cheese each May, cancelled only in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.