Carte Fromagère de la France

The story of this map

France has a cheese for every landscape — Camembert from the wet Normandy pastures, Comté from the high Jura, Roquefort from the limestone caves of the Rouergue, the goat cheeses strung along the Loire. This sheet puts that geography on the wall in the manner of the nineteenth-century agricultural maps: an engraved-style coastline, hatched terroir tints in a straw gold, rivers in blue, a compass rose, a scale bar in kilometres and a border of little wedges and wheels.

We drew it ourselves. The cheese maps people know from kitchen shops are modern illustrations still in copyright, and the period agricultural surveys in the archives are dense statistical sheets rather than wall art — so the studio made an original in the same spirit, dated and signed on the sheet so no one mistakes it for an antique.

Sixteen terroirs are named with their classic cheeses — Camembert and Livarot in Normandie, Époisses in Bourgogne, Reblochon and Beaufort in Savoie, Cantal and Saint-Nectaire in the Auvergne, Ossau-Iraty in the Basque country, Brocciu on Corsica — with the market towns marked from Reims to Perpignan. A legend along the foot repeats the whole list, which makes it the kind of print that gets read at dinner.

It is printed to order on archival matte paper and framed in black, oak or white, and it is the natural companion to our wine map of France for a kitchen or dining-room wall. A gift for the friend who brings the cheese course, or for the one who has just discovered it.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Not a restoration: this sheet is our own drawing. Rendered from vector artwork at print resolution, so every size is sharp. The paper tone and mottling are drawn in, not scanned.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.