Munster

I’ve spent enough dinner parties in Mexico defending Munster cheese’s honour that visiting the actual valley felt almost like a pilgrimage. The town sits at the head of a broad green valley in the Vosges, ringed by dairy pastures that climb into fir forest, and it was founded by Benedictine monks in the seventh century — the name itself just means “monastery” — who are usually credited with developing the cheese as a way of preserving surplus milk through the harsh winters up here.

The farms, the smell, and finally understanding it

We stopped at a ferme-auberge partway up the valley, one of the working farm-restaurants that still make and age Munster on site, and the farmer let us into the cellar where wheels of it sat turning on wooden shelves, each one washed regularly in brine to develop that famously assertive orange rind and smell that has scared off more than one house guest of mine back home. Eating it fresh there, still slightly warm from the cellar, with boiled potatoes and cumin the way it’s traditionally served, was nothing like the sharp, over-ripe version that occasionally turns up abroad — it was creamy and grassy and made complete sense of the pastures we’d just driven through. Lia, who had sworn off Munster after one bad supermarket experience years ago, quietly went back for a second slice.

Climbing onto the Route des Crêtes

Munster’s other role is as the natural starting point for the Route des Crêtes, the ridge road built during the First World War to move troops and supplies along the Vosges front line without exposing them to German artillery from the Alsace plain below. We picked it up just above town and climbed switchback after switchback until the dairy pastures gave way to open ridge, wind turbines turning slowly in the distance and, on the clearer stretches, a view all the way to the Rhine valley and the hazy line of the Black Forest beyond it. We stopped at the Col de la Schlucht to walk a short stretch on foot, past old military installations half-reclaimed by grass, before dropping back down into the valley as evening light flattened the pastures into long gold stripes.

When to go: June through September, once the high road is reliably clear of snow and the farm-auberges are running full service; early autumn brings the best light for the ridge views and the valley’s transhumance festival, when herds are walked down from the summer pastures.