From the Editors

Filled with indispensable information from America’s foremost authority, Max McCalman, <i>Cheese: A Connoisseur’s Guide to the World’s Best</i> is your road map to exploring the world of fine cheese. As the maître fromager at New York’s acclaimed Picholine restaurant (the first in the country to offer a serious cheese program) and author of the widely acclaimed<i> The Cheese Plate</i>, McCalman has selected, tasted, and studied hundreds of cheeses, serving them to thousands of cheese lovers. And now he has created the definitive reference on the subject. Cheese profiles about 200 of the world’s best cheeses—and only the best—complete with all the practical information you could need and all the fascinating details you could want.<br><br>An incredible variety of real cheeses from around the world—including right here in the United States—are becoming more widely available. From distinguished Cabrales to oozing Reblochon and buttery Fontina d’Aosta, real cheese can rival the most spectacular creations of chefs, and all you have to do is buy the good stuff and serve it properly. Cheese is the ultimate guide to doing just that. Profiles of the cheeses include not only McCalman’s evocative descriptions but fascinating information on how each cheese is made, who the best producers are, similar cheeses to seek out, and even tips on what time of year the cheese is at its peak, how to store it, and how to serve it for maximum enjoyment. <br><br>Of course, wine is cheese’s favorite companion, so McCalman taste-tested thousands of wine and cheese combinations to offer unprecedented guidance on exactly which wines are most compatible with each and every cheese. <br><br>From the A of Aarauer Bierdeckel to the Z of Zamorano, Cheese is an illuminating, seductive guide to the very best that the world’s cheesemakers have to offer.
Product Description

Customer Response

Best Cheese Guide
This book is well written and illustrated and not at all the work of a cheese snob. The pairings of cheese and wine are really helpful, and the ratings of cheese offer an excellent guide over a range of types. I've always liked cheese but now I can understand the range of cheese available, in what season and from what source.

CheesE
I have been searching for a cheese book that supplied detailed information. This book is the one! It has it all. Type of cheese, Provance, Producers, Prodution, Appearance, Similar Cheeses, Wine Pairnings and a little seasonal note. Not to mention great photographs.

Cheese graded on a 100 point scale? NO!
UPDATE -- I strongly urge those considering this book to take a look at McCalman's newest work, "Mastering Cheese." It is far more comprehensive and informative. It does not utilize the "100 point" rating scale that I found such an unnecessary distraction in this volume. In short, "Mastering Cheese" is truly McCalman's magnum opus and a book I recommend without any reservation. Granted, this is an attractive book in some ways. For cheese lovers, the close up color photos of the featured cheeses will verge on soft core dairy porn.

But if you are going to buy just one reference work on Cheese, this would not be it.

This is a useful, albeit somewhat limited reference guide, as it highlights only a handful of the many cheeses of the world -- McCalman's hand picked selection of "The World's Best." There is reasonably good introductory advice about cheese selection, caring for your cheese purchases, ideas for matching with wine and combining for a cheese plate.

However, where McCalman runs off the rails is his seemingly unnecessary and certainly inappropriate use of the dreaded "100 point rating scale." This is a silly exercise when applied to wine -- it is even more ludicrous when applied to cheese. On what basis is Laguiole a "91 point quality" cheese; Rogue River blue a 93 pointer; Humboldt Fog a 75 pointer; Pecorino Toscano 81 points; Soumaintrain an 80 pointer; Selles sur Cher an 89. To begin with, every one of these cheeses will vary wildly. A particular piece of Soumaintrain may be fabulous or fabulously boring -- and ditto any other cheese. Spend ten days in France, for example, and after the dinner cheese cart has come and gone ten times you will have learned, if nothing else, that every cheese will be different from restaurant to restaurant and from one night of the week to the next.

Furthermore, these "quality ratings" seem to reflect nothing more or less than McCalman's personal preferences or a particularly wonderful example of cheese X he may have stumbled across at some point. How else would Gouda, a wildly variable cheese that appears in a wide range from dull uninspired commercial to mature and complex farmhouse forms, merit a "96" without further elaboration, while Brin d'Amour, potentially fabulous stuff, pulls an 80, Chaource a 74? A good piece of Sbrinz is a smash with old Bordeaux -- but is it really a "99 point cheese"? I have no idea what the basis for these "quality scores" might be -- and unless I missed it, the book doesn't explain the scoring method either. Even if it did, that would not make the practice any more justifiable.

I can see it now. Just as there are those who fill their wine cellars strictly by the numbers, who will buy nothing but WS or WA "90 point and up" wines and refuse to look at anything at 89 and points south, there will be folks who will not touch any cheese rated under 90 -- and who will also put anything on a platter that scores 90 or over, no matter how terrific or abysmal the reality of the cheese in front of them may be. Rather than develop their own sense and sensibility about cheese (or anything else), they will color by numbers, encouraged by the likes of Robert Parker and now Max McCalman. "Parker gave the wine a 92 and McCalman says this cheese is a 96" -- "the wine" being some flaccid oak chipped, micro-oxygenated, acid and alcohol adjusted Australian shiraz and "this cheese" being a low fat, underripe, spongy and bland Gouda bought in a plastic vacuum pack at the corner Jiffy Mart.

The 100 point scoring thing is utter stuff and nonsense -- a holdover from grade school. While McCalman has done much to get Americans to start paying attention to cheese -- the endpapers call him "the unofficial spokesperson for fine cheese in the United States" -- his use of the 100 point scale here does a terrible disservice to the cause of fine cheese and to the readers of this book.

Buy the book, IGNORE THE SCORES.

Great cheese book
I bought this book for my husband who loves cheese. He is enjoying all of the wonderful information and learning of cheeses he didn't know existed.

A terrific book on cheese
I bought this book for my husband, who is a real cheese-aphile. So it was a risky purchase. He loves it! Lots of detail, lots of pictures, very in-depth.

One criticism that doesn't lower the star count, but the publishers should note: Except for the part of the book that goes cheese-by-cheese in detail, the rest of the cheese photographs (and there are many) are unidentified! That should be fixed - people who read this book don't consider cheese just a prop.

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