Goats cheese... all flowers and sunlight.

Like many British people, I came to goat's cheese quite late in life. I mean, when I was a kid, you could order fruit juice as a starter in a fairly posh restaurant... yes, children, it was once thus. Anyway, in our house, goats didn't produce cheese, cows did. And they made it all in a place called Cheddar.

Britain in the seventies, was not a place where food was discussed with any particular reverence. It came either hot, or cold. Cold was for lunch, hot was for dinner. Breakfast could be either.

The French have always had a far more sophisticated and nuanced relationship with food. They were asking important questions in kitchens, when we were still boasting about how great we were at Agincourt. We were busy with other things.

As far back as you can go without totally making it up, they have been making Goat's cheese in the Loire valley. It made economic sense before it became a gourmet thing. It was a small farm product. Goats gave better value as they required less rich pastures than cows did. They were more hardy and could graze almost anywhere. So goats cheese has a very long pedigree in this area where we now live. It is one of those foody things that doesn't feel "invented" as much as it feels "inherited"..

Now the French don't readily evangelize very many things. They tend not to have national icons A few sports persons perhaps, the occasional pop artist and the winner of the Tour de France, provided he is French. The same level of blasé seems also to apply to food. They have very high expecations around what they eat, and tend only to get vocal, when they are disappointed.

With cheese in France, no-one makes a huge fuss around it. There is not a waiter in the country trained in how to "elevate your cheese journey" or "channel your inner Laughing Cow". They will serve a decent slice of brie, a comely wedge of bleu d'auvergne or a small round of chèvre with a good baguette and trust you have the emotional maturity to know what to do next.

June, here in our neck of France, is when Loire Valley goats cheese quietly reaches its peak. Not because a horn heralds the start of the season, or because someone says so, but because the goats themselves are having a significantly better time of things.

After the long winter months, the Loire Valley begins opening itself properly to summer. The grasses come back lush and green. Wild herbs and wild orchids pepper the meadows. Hedgerows thicken and get soft enough to chew. This... the goats absolutely adore. Which matters, because happy goats, produce extraordinarily good milk.

By late spring and early summer, i.e. as I type this, the flavour changes completely. The cheeses become softer, fresher and more floral. It's as close as you can get to having a good lick of the landscape itself... grass, herbs, flowers, sunlight and rainfall transformed quietly into something creamy and faintly tangy. The French have a name for the soul of their productive land, deliberately untranslatable.. "Terroir"... It's a great word. It makes everyone else keep their food and wine distance.

So enough of that, and more about the cheese... who are the stars in a country about which De Gaulle himself remarked the sheer number of cheeses made France so difficult to govern. he had a point. Look at the mess Britain was in, back in the '70's, with just Cheddar to deal with.

Our first stop on the cheese bus, is the delicate offering of "Crottin de Chavignol", a cheese so small it initially appears optimistic rather than filling. The French, like us, sensibly name their cheeses after the villages of their birth. In this case the lovely village of Chavignol, in the Sancerre region of the Loire. Goats here, graze the rocky limestone-rich hillsides and the young, creamy and tangy chèvre made here, when paired with the flint-acidity of Sancere wine, is considered a food pairing made in heaven. As it ages, it hardens into something nuttier, deeper and more complex, developing the sort of self-confidence we humans spend a lifetime failing to achieve.

Then there is Sainte-Maure-de-Touraine, an elegant log-shaped cheese threaded through its centre with a piece of straw. This sounds faintly careless until you realise the French somehow make even the use of a piece of grass, as a cheesy, structural reinforcement feel chic. It's a lovely piece of cheese, with a musty, citrus flavoure that intensifies with age. The ash coating, provides a wonderful colour contrast when the cheese is cut, revealing the snow-white interior. The bit of straw? In theory, it is meant to make the little logs of cheese easier to pick up. In theory...

And finally "Valençay" - the famous almost pyramid-shaped chèvre, whose top appears mysteriously flattened. According to legend, Napoleon returned from the rather disastrous Egyptian campaign he launched in 1798, saw the pointed pyramid shape and demanded the top be sliced off because it reminded him too painfully of the recent sinking of his entire fleet by the British at the Battle of the Nile, under the command of one Horatio Nelson.. Whether this story is historically accurate is totally not the point. It feels true folklorically, which is more than enough in this hysterical and sensitive country.

The best possible summary for this little essay, would be to have you all over to ours, for a goats cheese buffet, but in the impossibility of that scenario, we can just say that food in France belongs to a time, and a sense of place. Sitting outside in rural France, with a piece of Lore Valley goats cheese and a freshly baked baguette feels a bit emotional.

The older I get, what seems like pretentious extravagence to some - to me - is just life dressed up as a small round of cheese that tastes of flowers and sunlight.