You’ll find a veritable buffet of fromageries and wineries
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By Adam Waxman
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Les Fromages
Chemin du Brûlé is a semi-hard farmhouse cheese with a line of vegetable ash in the center of its paste. Soft and smooth, it tastes of butter and hazelnut, while its rind elicits mild fruity, mushroomy aromatics. Inside the copper-coloured washed-rind of the Raclette de Compton au poivre is a semi-soft melty cheese with notes of butter and chestnut. It is punctuated by organic pink peppercorns that produce a mild heat and a more dynamic flavour profile. I particularly enjoy the Chemin Hatley, ripened between three to eight months on the spruce boards, and yielding floral and nutty aromatics. These are all delicious cheeses and we trust their quality. The specialty food shop here is chock full of sophisticated items that I would love in my own pantry. The maple syrup, for example, from their own grove, is ambrosial.
Today they craft twelve varieties of cheese from which they produce 300,000kg annually. They also maintain an apple orchard of 3,500 apple trees, yielding 20 varieties of apples to make apple sauce, apple butter, apple cider vinegar, and three types of apple cider: Brut, half-dry, and Kir Abbatial. When in season, we can even pick our own apples here.
In the gift shop, we make our selection of purchases, and sit in a pastoral field outside to enjoy them. Bleu Bénédictin is creamy Roquefort style cheese, and Ermite, an original cheese from the monastery, and the first one the monks ever made, is another creamy blue cheese but with a more earthy, mushroomy essence. There is a range of styles from the Italian Fontina and Smoked Fontina to the mild Swiss Mont Saint-Benoît with a subtle nutty flavour. Our favourite is the Frère Jacques, a firm cheese with an essence of hazelnut, and similar to a Gruyere. This is not a typical dairy experience, it feels cloistered, and yet sitting in the grass by the monastery, eating cheese, we feel absolutely transported to another place, another time.