The Best Italian Alpine Cheeses

What does it mean to taste a real mountain cheese?

Eating mountain cheese means immersing oneself in the most beautiful places of our more ancestral and pastoral Italy. A unique, emotional, unpredictable experience that will lead you to savor the best culinary masterpieces of Italy. Mountain cheese is an art passed down from generation to generation and is produced in the most fascinating natural landscapes that make this delicious food unique and exclusive.
The cheese is derived from milk obtained from cows raised in mountain pastures where nature and peace reign supreme. The secret behind the uniqueness of this product is precisely the pasture, which allows animals to develop their musculature and enjoy better health regarding circulation and lungs. The typical bitter taste of these cheeses allows you to fully enjoy their exceptionality, a unique flavor that you will not find in any other cheese.

Mountain Cheese: benefits and nutritional values

Mountain cheese retains all the benefits of milk, in particular, it is a source of high-quality protein and minerals that are allies for bone health (especially calcium). Cheese made from milk from pasture-raised cows has better organoleptic and nutritional characteristics than milk from the plains.
Grazing helps to enhance the acidic profile of the milk, especially those mono and polyunsaturated fats that positively affect metabolism and our well-being. In particular, it contains conjugated linoleic acids, omega 3, and omega 6, which are the so-called essential fatty acids for our body. Our body does not contain enzymes that can synthesize on its own, enzymes that are instead present in the rumen of cattle.
Cheese obtained in the mountains preserves these characteristics that improve our immune system and contribute to a greater sense of satiety. The conjugated linoleic acids in mountain cheeses are famous for their antioxidant properties, their positive function against arteriosclerosis, and their ability to reduce body fat while increasing lean mass.
The quantity of these acids depends on the breed of the cattle, its dietary regime, altitude, the production season, processing practices, and the duration of aging.
Our mountain cheeses have a high concentration of these acids precisely because they are produced by master artisans who are custodians of all the secrets related to the processing of this refined food.

Mountain and Alpine Cheese

You have often come across these two types of cheese wondering what truly differentiates them. The term mountain identifies the agricultural and zootechnical activity that takes place in mountain pastures during the summer months. One might think that the pasture is a fixed place, but it is instead the combination of fixed and mobile factors in which the activity of mountain grazing occurs. Mountain grazing begins with the ascent, which takes place between the end of May and mid-June, and ends with the descent to the plains, which occurs at the end of September.

Mountain Cheese: some curiosities

Tradition teaches that mountain cheese is produced directly at the pasture to maintain the unique characteristics that distinguish the vegetation present in that specific location, while cheese produced in dairies will be more uniform as it comes from different pastures. An interesting curiosity is that mountain cheeses can only be produced in the summer; the characteristics of these cheeses are completely different from those that are commercially available, both in terms of taste and freshness as well as in terms of quality and origin.

The mountain brings out your most authentic emotions, and mountain cheese encapsulates all these emotions in a unique food that is essential for our daily well-being.