Round one, 1995: taking some baby steps to ever-so-slightly enlarge my hitherto blinkered view of the world of cheese, I’d discovered the agreeably anodyne pleasures of brie. At a supermarket one day I picked up a portion of ‘premium’ brie without looking closely at the label. What I’d bought was, in fact, some Brie de Meaux, a strongly-flavoured variant whose aroma soon fully pervaded my tiny fridge. It proved too intense for my then-uneducated palate: I didn’t like it.

Round two, 2022: At a gîte in the grounds of a château near Épernay the morning after a wedding, nursing quite the hangover having absorbed a tremendous quantity of fizzy wine, breakfast was served; a simple matter of pastries, bread and cheeses. Among the fromages on offer was some Brie de Meaux. I had a taste and, with my palate better-schooled through exposure to a variety of cheeses over the preceding years, I loved it.

Since then, an occasional morsel of Meaux has become a recurring little luxury. I bought some at Aldi the other day, its AOC designation placing its origin within the Seine et Marne department (which includes Meaux itself). Wikipedia suggests, however, that “there is […] no production close to Meaux, and there is little celebration of the cheese in the town.” Having said that, the existence of a Maison du Brie de Meaux museum indicates at least a modicum of local pride.

Wikipedia intrigues us further by stating that Brie de Meaux “was named the ‘king of cheeses’ in 1815 by Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna.” Not even knowing what the Congress of Vienna entailed, I further learn that it was “a series of international diplomatic meetings to discuss and agree upon a possible new layout of the European political and constitutional order after the downfall of […] Napoleon Bonaparte.” Not a dairy products trade show then. I’m informed, however, that the factoid about Talleyrand first came to light in a volume of gossipy memoir printed some twenty-six years after the event, so its historical basis isn’t the soundest.