Roquefort – a high price for success? The mayor recounts his problems with cheese

I enjoyed a fascinating interview yesterday with Bernard Sirgue, mayor of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. This tiny village in the south of France is famous for transforming ewe’s milk into blue cheese worth €350 million a year.

We discussed the challenges of administering a commune where 80% of the properties are owned by the world’s largest dairy group, most of the others are owned by six other cheesemakers, and all of these companies choose to leave the majority of their buildings uninhabited. This has resulted in fewer and fewer places to live, a dwindling population, the disappearance of every shop apart from the pharmacy, and a steady decline in the number of tourists coming to discover the village and its celebrated cheese.

Monsieur Sirgue also told me about his ambitious project to revitalise the village before 2025, a year that will mark the centenary of Roquefort becoming the first French foodstuff to enjoy the protection of an appellation d’origine contrôlée (the first wine followed a decade later).

When I left the mayor’s office, the temperature outside was 32 degrees Celsius so I sensibly decided to go deep underground and visit the cellars where every single Roquefort cheese is ripened (all the cheeses in the photo are fake!)

During my first visit to Roquefort a few weeks earlier, an abundance of shuttered windows had made me think everyone was still in bed. Then I noticed how few of the houses had letterboxes, and I began to delve deeper into its story. If the mayor has his way, Roquefort will become a more agreeable place to visit, but it is perhaps more fascinating and certainly more bizarre to wander its empty streets today. It certainly merits a chapter in my forthcoming book.

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