Best Bites: The seven most memorable cheeses of 2022

We bring the curtain down on 2022 with the help of friends in fromage recalling the most memorable cheese that crossed their palates during the past 12 months. We add our favourites, too.

Check out the tasting notes and make up your shopping list for the next visit to a cheese shop or, better yet, right to the cheesemaker. If you like, you can order online for convenient home delivery.

Let’s begin with cheese educator and cheese sommelier Vanessa Simmons, our BF in fromage:

My most memorable cheese taste of 2022 is Maggie’s Christmas Cheese Ball by Maggie Paradis of La Fromagerie Les Folies Bergères. Not only does Maggie make a variety of amazing goat, sheep and cow milk cheeses, but she and her husband, shepherd Christian Girard, are passionate, talented and wonderful people.

This coveted, sell-out cheese makes an appearance once a year for the holidays and is a combination of Maggie’s locally made cow and sheep milk cream and hard cheeses with a few added extras like scallions, lemon juice and sriracha that deliver its zing and umami, savoury flavour. Finished with crushed pecans for festive flair, it’s the best, silky, cheesecake-like cheese ball you will ever enjoy—made with love.

Pair with a local oaky Chardonnay, caramelized onion, bacon or apricot/peach jam and your favourite crusty baguette or sourdough bread and you have an instant party on your hands.

Gurth Pretty is a professional chef and cheese connoisseur whose goal is to show to Canadians and the world the delicious cheese produced in Canada. He combined his love for Canada and his passion for cheese to write The Definitive Guide to Canadian Artisanal and Fine Cheese and The Definitive Canadian Wine & Cheese Cookbook, co-written with Tony Aspler. These days he owns and operates Lakeview Cheese Galore in Mississauga, Ontario.

One of my most memorable cheese this year was Greystone, produced by Katie and Will at River’s Edge Goat Dairy. They use the milk from their herd of goats, located at their farm near Arthur, Ontario.

The appearance of this ash-coated, white bloomy rind goat ball reminds me of a French Bonde de Gâtine cheese. As Greystone ripens, its paste becomes creamier and develops a more noticeable goat aroma.

It is a delicious artisanal farmstead cheese!

Jackie Armet is a longtime friend in cheese who has worked with me as cheese co-ordinator at The Great Canadian Cheese Festival and then the Canadian Cheese Awards. A graduate of the Professional Fromager program at George Brown College in Toronto, Jackie lives in Prince Edward County and offers in-person tutored tastings and consulting services via Cheese Experience.

My most memorable and impressive cheese this year is Wildwood made by Stonetown Artisan Cheese in St. Marys, Ontario. It was given to me as a mystery cheese and I felt it was from Europe. It has all the features that make Comte and Appenzeller outstanding. It could certainly be a challenger to the throne.

For Debbie Levy, longtime cheese educator, the cheese experience of the year was delivered by Blue Moo made by COWS Creamery of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

We are fortunate in Canada to have some great blue cheese makers and now I have added Blue Moo to the list. Love the texture of this triple cream. Although it’s a milder blue, there is something about its buttery savoury notes that just has me reaching for more!

During a cross-Canada road trip this year, we spent the better part of a day with Chef Dustin Peltier in the tiny make room at Loaf and Honey in Winnipeg learning about the trials and tribulations of producing Golden Prairie.

The recipe and method behind the cheese dates back to the 1700s in Trappist monasteries in France. It has been made in Manitoba by Trappist monks at Notre Dame des Prairies monastery since 1918, since the 1940s by Brother Alberic. When Dustin Peltier learned Brother Alberic, then in his 80s, planned to stop making Fromage de la Trappe, he was determined to continue the tradition. He spent a year being mentored by Brother Alberic, aiming to continue making the cheese in its traditional way, with raw, unpasteurized milk.

Unfortunately, Dustin ran into a bureaucratic maze at Manitoba Agriculture, which prevented him—or any other artisan producer in the province—from using raw milk in cheese production. Thus, he was forced to use non-homogenized, pasteurized organic cow milk in the making of Golden Prairie. The cheese is still hand-washed daily and aged for 60 days before being released to the public.

Golden Prairie has a unique flavour profile, with a touch of tang and loads of dairy. Only available for purchase in Manitoba at selected cheese shops.

During our camping trip to the Rockies, we also visited an old friend in cheese, Ian Treuer, now cheesemaker at Lakeside Farmstead Cheese in Sturgeon County just north of Edmonton. Here we found two memorable cheese tastes of 2022:

We’ve already reported on how the world’s first Chaga Cheddar came to be with its unique appearance and distinctive flavour, all the result of cheddar curds soaking in a bath of chaga tea before being molded, pressed and aged for up to seven weeks. The resulting cheese is beautifully marbled and has a creamy texture and mild, nutty flavour.

The other memorable cheese we discovered was Lakeside Farmstead Clothbound Cheddar, a truly full-flavoured cheddar. Each wheel is made in the old-world tradition, hand-wrapped with cheesecloth, then sealed with wax and carefully aged for a minimum of one year. Clothbound Cheddar exhibits delightful nutty, fruity/citrus and caramel/sweet undertones with a complex and lingering finish. It has some crumble and crystallization providing a desirable mouth feel. All in all, it’s really delicious.

Lakeside cheese is available only in Alberta at present, from selected cheese shops and a retail store at the farm open Wednesday through Saturday.

—Georgs Kolesnikovs

Georgs Kolesnikovs, Cheese-Head-in-Chief at CheeseLover.ca, has never met a cheese he didn’t like . . . well, hardly ever. Follow him on his travels across Canada on Substack at On the Road, Across the Sea.