The 2010 Festival will take place on October 9 & 10

By– Chris

Paris, France

I knew I was in a place hardly touristed when a friendly group of French at Bar du Centre gently mocked me for diluting my pastis with too much water and asked me, “What are you doing here?  You wanted to know the real deep France?”.  I responded, “Isn’t this festival des fromages famous?”  The students, seeming a little puzzled looked at one another, snickered and their spokesman said, “Maybe in this region.” This scene occurred at the 10th Annual Festival des Fromages de Meulan where we (i.e. Sarah and I) may have been the only two foreigners (American anyway) enjoying the ‘deep France’ experience.  With the quirkiness of a small town fair paired with world-class cheese and wine along with a jovial atmosphere this festival is a worthwhile excursion if you find yourself in or around Paris during the second week of October.

One of my travel mantras is “be open minded”, which sometimes is challenging but the rewards can be remarkable. The Meulan Festival de Fromages falls squarely into that category.  I came across a billboard advertising the event during a race from Paris to Versailles, in which we finished 13,880th out of 14,000 runners. How we ended up in the race is another story along the same lines of being open minded and taking risks. The short version is that somehow I did not translate ‘race’ to mean that everyone runs the entire 17k’s from Paris to Versailles.  I figured that there must be a walking category, which there was not. This was clear by the 1000s of runners who buzzed by looking at us with a bit of pity and embarrassment and solidified by the French spectators who kept encouraging us by saying, “Have courage you’ll make it!”  TIP:  Just because there may be a “walking” category in your local 5K does not mean that there is one in the Paris Versailles Race.  Nevertheless, talking our sweet time, we saw the beautiful French countryside where we found the billboard advertising the Meulan Cheese Festival. I snapped a picture- one of the perks of walking- thinking to myself that it would be a good Sunday adventure.

After deciding to give the festival a go, a little research was in order. It began with the obligatory Google search which yielded sparse information that confirmed that Meulan exists, but nothing about a cheese festival. I changed preferences to yield French language results and voila I found that the 10th Annual Festival des Fromages was on the local municipality website, no more information than that, but at least I knew it existed.  TIP: change Google to search to the language of the country that you are searching to find more local flavor, then translate the page into English.  Usually the translation hacks up the sentences but it will do a good job on dates and times which are usually most important.  Even with this anemic intelligence we still decided to go, but in the back of our minds we felt that it was possible that it could be a bust.

Getting to Meulan from Paris is easy and efficient as it’s only 40 kilometers away to the west. When we arrived we were still skeptical about this festival, which was reinforced in that we were the only two to get off the train to enter the empty train station.  I swallowed deeply and quickly scurried about to look for some sign of civilization beyond the graffiti tags when we found, hidden away, a stack of fliers and then we saw a person in the ticket office. By simply pointing to the flier the ticket woman got a look of shock on her face as if to say, “Really, you came from Paris for this?”. She recovered and personally escorted us to the door, three meters away, giving us very detailed instructions that we thought might require a TomTom but essentially meant: follow this road to there.  What a nice greeting.

When we saw these dancers, the cheese and wine we knew we had tourist gold.

As we approached Meulan center it appeared that the festival was only a couple of makeshift stands selling cheese and a cafe. My first thought was, “Great. Fantastic. Two awkward events in a row.”   Fearing the worst I distanced myself away from Sarah so I could more easily see if she were to attack. However, we were pleasantly surprised when we looked around the corner and saw mountains of cheese, magnums of wine, folk dancers in traditional garb and hundreds of people. We had had found tourist gold: an authentic experience with heaps of cheap, free even, food and wine. Plus we were really going to have to be effective with our ‘point and pray’ communication technique (i.e. point at something and pray that’s what you get) as we seemed to be the only English speakers. The exception being a four-year-old girl who proudly proclaimed, ‘Je parle l’anglais,’ and counted in English for us, “one, tu, fee, fo, five, ses, seben, eet, nine, dix.”  This and a cold beer started what was a very pleasant, fun and inexpensive “deep France” day in Meulan.

Highlights:

The scene:

After being relieved to know that the festival really existed it went on to exceed our expectations.  The brochure says that there are 100 cheese vendors / makers in attendance with 300 varieties of cheese, this was spot on.  We found that the stalls stretched on for about a kilometer through the main square where many of the stalls were set up.  The atmosphere was complete with folk dancers, one man bands, French rappers, goat milking lessons with the teacher squirting onlookers from the goat’s utter.  So, plenty of entertainment.

The cheeses (les fromages):

With fresh cheese at every corner in Paris I felt that it would be a waste to focus on the common cheeses such as brie, Camembert and chevre so I focused my inner Andrew Zimmern and went for the cheeses that I thought were most bizarre.  Tomme au Marc:  A tomme is a cheese made with cream after much of the fat is removed for butter and richer cheeses; marc is the leftovers (i.e. skins and seeds) after wine making that are also used for grappa in Italy and marc in France.  Together what happens is a crusted, lower fat cheese that pairs well with red wines.  The dark, amost black, shell may be off-putting but I found this cheese very tasty.  Le Lavort:  This cheese comes from Auvergne and is what the French call “full of terrior” meaning that it has the distinct taste of its land of origin.  Kind of like an Italian pecorino but softer and nuttier, Le Lavort looks like a wheel of cheese dunked in dust and dirt.  Actually it was buying this cheese that we had our snag in the day when we got stuck with a €10.00 hunk, which was not too huge but was at least 3x bigger than we wanted.  Sometimes “point and pray” simply does not work.

Pierre, maker of Rose Bonnet

The wines (vins):

What I didn’t anticipate, which I suppose was a no-brainer, was that there would be so many varieties of wine.  There was at lease 40 stands representing many regions and all the owners were more than happy to let us have a sip or taste of their creations.  After sampling a dozen or so rose we chose Rose Bonnet made by Pierre-Yves Perrachon of Chateau Bonnet.  It is smooth, full flavored and not sweet.  Our choice rouge is from Domaigne Chassagne of Beaujolais ( a region in Burgundy) called the Beaujolais Villages.  Even though we should have let it age another 3 to 5 years we still enjoyed the delicious tannin rich wine with its slight undertones of vanilla and red berries.

The food:

One well dressed sandwich

Simple, traditional, cheap and delicious.  Just like going to any small town fair there was a wide selection of easy to eat and bad for you food.  There was a plate called Tartiflette which because of its popularity I imagined an old traditional food but apparently it is the product of an 80’s marketing initiative by the Reblochon cheese trade union.  Tartiflette falls into the oey-goey-cheesy starchy food group and seems about as popular and diverse as macaroni and cheese.  Another interesting set-up was a melted cheese sandwich with ham that the wait for turned out to be the defining moment of this experience.  When we were waiting in line to get this sandwich everything ‘deep France’ seemed to converge into one of those perfect moments.  We had: some type of French rapper, for lack of a better word, who was rapping along with a brass band and creating a pretty good beat (not unlike the bands at Octoberfest), then there were the small children who were dancing, we were dancing, the wine guy was dancing and the sandwich maker who was a good 2 meters tall (6′6″) was rocking out dressed in leotards, thigh high leather boots, a fish-net mini skirt and topped of with a pony-tail restrained scrunchy, while continuing to scrape gooey cheese goodness into baguettes.  Ah, what a scene.

The Meulan Cheese Festival goes in my plus column as a positive experience.  Now onto another hidden place that gets a mere few thousand Google results.  Luckily we got a recommendation for just such a place from Pierre, our rose wine maker, who mentioned a festival in a place called La Chapelle de Guinchay (3,400 Google pages or .0001% of Paris’s pages).  So off we go.

If anyone has any other experiences in these small town festivals let us know.

Happy Travels,

Chris

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