Just past the neat vineyards and country houses with their blue shutters and tile roofs, goats munch their way through a field of thigh-high plants more typical to Sudan and India than Southern France.
It is late September, and 81 degrees Fahrenheit (27 Celsius) — unseasonably warm, which is increasingly common and in fact the whole point.
The goats have purposefully been put out to graze on a specially planted patch of sorghum, the unwitting participants in a study to see how drought-resistant crops will affect their milk.
More important is whether that milk still renders a tasty Picodon — a 60-gram, hockey puck-shaped cheese with notes of hazelnut and mushroom that is synonymous with the region.
The experiment is part of a scramble by cheesemakers to see if they can adapt their methods within the strict rules governing how the highest-quality French cheeses are made, or whether climate change necessitates that those rules loosen, a near heresy for many.
“We are studying all the aspects of cheesability,” said Philippe Thorey, trailing the large herd through the field at a government-funded experimental goat farm west of the town of Montélimar. “We’ve assembled a jury of experts that will taste test the cheese to make sure it follows all the rules. They have about 20 criteria of taste.”
That’s right: 20.
France takes cheese seriously. Ask someone like celebrated food and restaurant critic François-Régis Gaudry about cheese, and he’s likely to grow nostalgic about his mother’s cheese plates, filled with mold-dotted Roquefort from the south, a buttery Comté from the eastern mountains and a northern creamy Camembert de Normandie, and how she would set it down and announce, “Now, we will taste France.”
Mr. Gaudry defines cheese as a ritualistic passage between a meal and dessert and the embodiment of the country’s diverse terroirs — a French word denoting particular landscapes, their climates and the local farming traditions that deftly tease out their specific flavors.
“The history of French cheese is a love story between men, animals and the earth,” he said.
While former President Charles de Gaulle was said to have grumbled over the difficulty of governing a country with 246 cheeses, Mr. Gaudry’s book — “Let’s Eat France” — puts the number at 1,200.
