RHYTHMS & FLAVOURS

A TWO-WHEELED MEANDER THROUGH THE LOWLANDS OF CENTRAL EMILIA-ROMAGNA REVEALS THE GASTRONOMIC HIGHS OF ITALY'S 'FOOD VALLEY'

- DUNCAN CRAIG

Hands clasped firmly behind his back, with the beady vigilance of a parade-ground sergeant major, Alessandro Ferrarini strides among his massed ranks of cheese.

Several thousand recruits are lined up. Evenly spaced and immaculately presented, they stand on rows of shelves reaching almost to the ceiling.

Alessandro — the fleece beneath his waxy, army-green lab coat zipped up to the neck against the carefully calibrated cold — is here to sniff out imperfection. He spots a suspect, wrestles it expertly down from the shelf onto a wooden stool and sets about it with a hammer. A very small hammer.

“You’re listening for a higher pitch,” he says, tapping delicately at the base of the 45kg wheel and squinting as he gauges the reverberations. “That would betray a crack, a void. Weakness.” The penalty? “Downgraded. It won’t make selection. Standards are very, very high.”

It’s a Darwinian existence, the world of parmigiano reggiano, but it didn’t start out that way. Eight centuries ago, when Benedictine monks first began ageing wheels of cow’s milk in a fertile, sun-drenched river valley a couple of dozen miles east of here, it was simply a tentative experiment in food preservation. But so sought-after proved their salty, granular and unusually versatile creation, that every stage of this monastic alchemy would ultimately find itself wrapped in a stringent cloak of regulation.