Alpine Cheese Tradition Is Disappearing — Can It Be Saved?

In Italy’s Valle d’Aosta, I ducked into a tunnel carved into the side of a mountain. Once a copper mine, it now holds thousands of wheels of Fontina DOP, one of the Alps’ most storied cheeses. The first thing that hit was the smell: wood smoke, moss, and the unmistakable savory tang of cheese as it slowly ripens.

I had asked Massimiliano Accornero, sales manager for the regional producers’ cooperative, to snap a photo of me in the cave. 

“Wait until we get to the end,” he said with a smile. “There’s an amazing view of so much cheese.”

But when we reached the far wall, several shelves sat empty.

Accornero shook his head. “It’s weird for me,” he said quietly. “I’ve never seen it this way in my life.”

The empty shelves are the result of a sharp drop in production across the region. Fontina producers are making significantly less cheese than usual, brought on by a perfect storm of challenges: climate shifts, rising costs, labor shortages, and changing consumer habits. For one of Italy’s most iconic mountain cheeses, the ripple effects are beginning to show, not just in the aging caves, but on grocery shelves around the world.

A thousand years of cheesemaking

Alpine cheese is made traditionally in the mountains of Switzerland, Italy, France, and Austria, where cows graze on wild herbs and flowers. There’s no official, regulated definition of “Alpine cheese,” but many of the most iconic examples, like Le Gruyère AOP, Fontina DOP, and Comté, are protected by European designations that control where and how they’re made. This isn’t Gruyère-style cheese from Wisconsin, or generic “Alpine blend” shreds from the grocery aisle. It’s cheese that’s rooted deeply in geography, culture, and seasonality, shaped by altitude and history.

Fontina’s story, for example, goes back more than 800 years. First documented in 1217, it’s made only from raw milk produced by Valdostana cows that graze on steep mountain pastures on Italy’s side of the Alps. Gruyère has an even longer lineage. It was first recorded in 1115 in what’s now western Switzerland. These cheeses are more than just food — they are living cultural artifacts, made the same way for centuries in a rhythm dictated by the seasons and land. 

In the summer, cows ascend to high-altitude pastures, where the wild grasses, herbs, and flowers lend complex flavors to the milk. These alpages, as they are called in French, are the heart of Alpine cheesemaking. From June to September, families live and work in simple, often solar-powered chalets, where they make cheese in wood-fired copper vats and age them in stone-lined cellars. When the weather cools, cows and people descend the mountain in a celebratory désalpe or désarpa, sometimes accompanied by parades, garlands, and bells.

This seasonal migration with the herd is both romantic and grueling, rooted in necessity and reverence. It’s what gives Alpine cheese its soul, and it is now increasingly under threat.

A delicate ecosystem under pressure

Every producer I spoke with agreed: the challenges facing Alpine cheesemaking are not singular. They are interwoven and mounting.

The most urgent is climate change. Emma Fuchs, an Austrian cheesemaker who spends her summers in the Allgäu Alps, with her husband Richard, says that the season has shifted. 

“We used to go up the mountain in early June. Now, we go in early May,” she says. “The grass grows faster, but not better. There’s less snow, which means less water. The cows have less to drink, and the grass is less nutritious. It looks O.K., but it’s not.” 

The Fuchs make a cheese called Alpe Loche, which is matured for a year in a stone cellar underneath their home. The cheese bursts with layers of flavors from puckery guava to meaty broth. 

In alpine ecosystems, even subtle shifts have cascading effects. Fewer snowmelt-fed streams mean parched pastures. Hotter days dry up valleys faster. With less high-quality forage, milk yields decline and the resulting cheeses lose some of their complexity. In a place where each wheel represents a season’s worth of effort, that impact is profound.

Labor and generational succession are another challenge. “The number one problem is that young people don’t want this life,” says Accornero. “They don’t want to work every weekend and every holiday. They want jobs that pay better and offer more time off.” That sentiment is echoed in Gruyère, where herds are consolidating, villages are shrinking, and many in the next generation choose other paths.

“It’s not just about being born into it,” says Fuchs, who has three generations under one roof. “You have to be in harmony with the cows, the mountains, the rhythm. If it’s not in your body, it’s not the right life.”

Economics and trade also complicate the picture. Tariffs, currency fluctuations, and rising production costs have made small-scale cheese operations harder to sustain. In Italy’s Aosta Valley, for instance, Fontina DOP production has declined from 4,006 tons in 2021 to 3,814 tons in 2023. 

Feed costs have surged due to supply chain disruptions and poor harvests linked to extreme weather. Energy expenses have spiked due to fuel price volatility, especially for producers who rely on heat and refrigeration in remote, mountainous regions. 

Retail prices for cheeses like Le Gruyère AOP and Comté have seen noticeable increases. Some varieties cost up to 40% more than they did a few years ago. 

“Milk prices used to go in cycles,” says Michele Buster, co-founder of Forever Cheese and creator of Save the Shepherd. “But now, the pressure is constant. Small and medium farms are closing. If we don’t make this profession respected — and viable — we’ll lose it.”

Signs of hope

Buster started Save the Shepherd in 2022 to combat a decline in the region’s farms and shepherds.

Her initiative highlights the stories of aging shepherds and cheesemakers who fear there’s no one left to take over. “We need to stop picturing cheesemakers as mountain men with walking sticks,” says Buster. “There’s incredible technology and innovation happening. This work can be modern. It can be cool. But we need to show that.”

At Alpe Loche, Fuch’s nephew, Florian, has taken up the torch. Rather than scale up, he invested in better infrastructure: a small milking parlor to replace hand-milking, a free-stall barn that gives cows more space and comfort, and modest mechanical upgrades to make the work more humane. “They didn’t do it to make more cheese,” says Sigfried von Frankenberg-Leu, who stayed with the family during a cheesemaking apprenticeship. “They did it to make life better — for the animals and the people.”

Last September, I stepped onto the farm of Le Gruyère AOP milk producer Nicolas Jotterand, and into what felt like The Sound of Music, in the countryside outside of Biere, Switzerland. Jotterand’s farm is perched on a hilltop north of the Alps, in the foothills of Mount Moléson. The hills were alive that day with regal Holstein cows. Their large bells rang in the gentle breeze as they munched on grass and wild herbs. In every direction, the sun shone generously on bright green hills.

At Jotterand’s farm, innovation meets stewardship. Solar panels line the roof. Manure is composted and reused as fertilizer. Methane emissions are tracked and mitigated with essential oils. “It’s not one thing that makes our milk high quality,” says Jotterand. “It’s all of it: how we treat the cows, the land, the air. Everything matters.”

Even the supply chain is evolving to meet the moment. Jonathon Richardson of Columbia Cheese described how their team builds long-term relationships with Alpine producers. “We don’t get as much cheese as we want, but we get what we can,” he says. “We bring them American whiskey. We check in. That connection [is] part of the sustainability, too.”

What we stand to lose (and save)

Alpine cheeses like Fontina and Gruyère are nutty, grassy, silky, and complex. But that’s not all. They are the sum of landscapes, people, practices, and time. Each wheel carries the imprint of a place and season: the grass that grew that summer, the hands that turned it, the cellars that aged it.

If these traditions fade, we don’t just lose flavor. We lose a worldview. A way of living close to the land. A model of slow food, intentional work, and intergenerational knowledge. We lose the bells on the cows’ necks, the stories passed down at the vat, and the alpages that dot the mountains like time capsules.

But we don’t have to lose it, at least not yet. These cheeses are still here. People still believe in them. They’re still climbing mountains in May, making two wheels a day by hand (on a good day), braving steep pastures, erratic weather and low pay to bring something extraordinary into the world. All they ask is that we pay attention. That we pay a little more. That we care. And when we taste a sliver of these alpine cheeses, that’s incredibly easy to do.