China's Cheese Infatuation Is Getting Ripe

There are a fair few things about the UK that I miss dearly, having moved to China just shy of two years ago. Family. Friends. Being able to walk up to pretty girls in bars and say phrases in their native language other than "Please stop the car here", "Can you sell it to me cheaper, please?" and "Sorry, I'm English."

Also on top of my miss list is the wide availability of cheese. In general, the Chinese don't really do cheese, small amounts of which are available in large foreign-owned supermarkets such as Carrefour (nestled among the live turtles) or from specialist expat shops. The former tend to offer uninspiring imports of basics, like English cheddars, Président, and a few locally made brie knock-offs. The latter tend to be so expensive that you can't help thinking about how you're eating 50p with every lump swallowed.

The overall amount of cheese being imported is low: 47,316 tonnes (worth about £130 million) in 2013, with almost half coming in from New Zealand. But those figures marked a 22 percent rise from 2012, and a 106 percent rise from 2010. It's certainly not a boom, but it suggests that the Stilton whiff wafting over from the other side of the world isn't quite as unappealing as it used to be.

Most of the consumption hike comes from processed cheese sales, which has been aided by the increasing popularity of chains such as Pizza Hut (where you can also buy a mildly disturbing "Texas steak" that resembles plastic Argos food and tastes even worse). Beyond the piles of cheap-ish, Simpsons-yellow processed offerings, however, this rise is also reflected in the amount of posh imported cheese that China's quickly expanding middle classes are eating.

French-style wine bar Enoterra, which has branches in Shanghai and Beijing, launched eight years ago, offering cheese platters that are alien to most Chinese. "Locals were intrigued when they saw them—they'd giggle," Pierre Monie, Enoterra's managing director, tells me. "There was a lot of curiosity about the smell aspect, but maybe ten percent would order one. But now it's at least half, which is an incredible rise."

Wine consumption is on the rise in China, with more and more wine bars like Enoterra popping up in the biggest cities. Monie says that the reason for the increasing acceptance of cheese in his venues is that customers have, over the course of the last decade, observed that it's a natural pairing and bought into it as the "correct" way of enjoying wine.

Monie concedes that we are not, sadly, at a point where legions of Chinese people are stockpiling Stinking Bishop in their home fridges. "They'll order cheese but they do tend to leave about half of it on the platter," he says. "They try it out, and it fits the picture of the wine bar. Emmental is number one here, as it's easy to eat, but the blue cheeses are almost never touched."

Cheese-eating among the wealthy might be mainly for show in wine bars such as Enoterra. In Beijing, however, a man named Liu Yang has found enough local dairy love to open his own small factory and shop: Le Fromager de Pekin. Having trained in Corsica, he is the only person making French-style cheese in Beijing and boasts versions of Camembert, Munster, and fromage blanc among his ever-swelling product range.

"We opened in 2009, and back then almost 95 percent of our customers were foreigners," Yang says. "But now it's about half and half. Chinese people are very open when it comes to food. It didn't take us long to embrace coffee, wine, and chocolate. New foods just need a bit of time to lay roots."

Cheese isn't taking off in the same way that, say, red wine has recently (China recently overtook France as the biggest consumer of red wine worldwide) but its cult treat status among the country's elite is being cemented. Furthermore, a 2013 report from market intelligence firm Euromonitor International pointed to the Chinese perception of cheese being extremely healthy as a potential growth indicator.

Monie concurs. "I was at the house of a wealthy private customer the other day and he was feeding his seven-year-old child strong goat cheese," he says. "He sees it as healthy, strong for bones and so on, and the kid was loving it! Some people will be eating stuff like this from a young age now."

Perhaps this rich kid with a taste for dairy isn't quite representative of the wider tastes of a new generation quite yet, but hey, even I wouldn't have gone near a pungent pile of goat cheese when I was seven. Smells like progress.