Somebody has to eat the wheel. It may as well be you.
Which Parmigiano dairy lets you into the ageing room at seven in the morning. What a canal cruise with a cheese board actually costs in Amsterdam. Whether the fondue place in Zurich is worth the tram. Reviews of the cheese tours and tastings you can book today.
A dairy at dawn, a canal at dusk, a windmill in between.
Four bookings that carry a first cheese trip. What each costs, how long it takes, and what the people who went home smelling of it said afterwards.
01The evening oneAmsterdam Classic Saloon Boat Cruise with Drinks and CheeseA saloon boat down the Amsterdam canals with a board of Dutch cheese in front of you. Book the seven o clock departure and let the city go past.
02The dairy morningParmigiano Production and Parma Ham Tour & TastingCurd, brine, then the ageing room where the wheels are stacked to the ceiling. It starts before eight because that is when cheese is made.
03The windmill dayGuided Zaanse Schans, Windmills & Cheese TourZaanse Schans, the green timber houses and a farm that still presses Gouda by hand. Half a day from Amsterdam Centraal.
04The mountain nightSunset Tour with Cheese FondueZurich above the rooftops with a caquelon of melted Gruyère and Vacherin between you. Bring an appetite and flat shoes for the walk back.
Parmigiano Reggiano is made before breakfast. Book accordingly.
The consortium rules are strict, so every dairy in the province runs the same clock: milk in the copper vat by seven, curd broken by eight, the wheels into brine by mid-morning. Turn up at eleven and you get the ageing room and a tasting, which is not nothing, but it is not the making. Three kinds of Italian cheese day, and what it costs to walk into each.
★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · Tour Parmigiano Reggiano dairy and Parma ham
Parmesan and balsamicThe vat, the brine bath, the ageing room, then twelve, twenty-four and thirty-six months side by side.
Farm morningsSmall dairies in the hills, mostly family-run, usually ending with lunch you did not plan for.
Mozzarella by handWarm curd stretched in front of you on the Amalfi and Sorrento side, eaten within the hour.
All 93 Italian cheese tours →
The pairing is the whole booking. Get it right and the tasting doubles.
A hard alpine cheese wants something white and sharp, a washed rind wants a beer nobody warned you about, and a blue wants something sweet enough to feel like a mistake. The good tastings pour four or five glasses against six or seven cheeses and tell you why each pair works before you agree with them.
Six countries that made cheese a reason to travel.
Emilia-Romagna and its wheels, the Dutch market towns and their wax, Paris and its cellars, the Swiss alps and their fondue, the Yarra and Hunter valleys, and a Spanish coast that ages cheese in volcanic caves.
Amsterdam sells cheese by the wheel and eats it on the water.
Everything in the Netherlands →
Three shapes of Dutch cheese day, and they barely overlap. A tasting room where somebody cuts you eight ages of Gouda in a row, a boat with a board on the table, and a half day out to the windmills and the farms that still press by hand.
Eight ages of Gouda, in order
Young, matured, extra matured, then the crumbly thirty-six month one with the crystals in it. A good host makes you taste them backwards so the sweet old ones do not wipe out the fresh.
A board on a boat
Saloon boats leave from the canal belt with cheese, charcuterie and a bar. The seven o clock sailings catch the bridges lit and cost the same as the afternoon ones.
Zaanse Schans and the farms
Green timber houses, working windmills and a cheese farm where they still press by hand and hand round the clogs. Go early; the coaches from the city all arrive at eleven.
The cheese tours more travellers book than any other.
Every cheese tour we have reviewed →Not the rarest ones. The ones that sell out, and what earns each of them the slot.
1
Amsterdam Classic Saloon Boat Cruise with Drinks and Cheese
Spend an hour on Amsterdam’s canals aboard a covered wooden saloon boat. A guide points out the Anne Frank House, Jordaan, Rijksmuseum, Skinny Bridge, and more. Choose a central departure point, add Gouda cheese and mustard with unlimited beer, wine, and soft drinks, and bring a warm layer.
From · $21
Read our review →
2
Classic Saloon Boat Cruise with Cheese & Wine
from $18
3
Guided Zaanse Schans, Windmills & Cheese Tour
from $22
4
Zaanse Schans Windmills, Clogs and Dutch Cheese Small-Group Tour from Amsterdam
from $51
5
Montmartre Cheese, Wine & Pastry Guided Walking Tour
from $127
6
Volendam and Zaanse Schans Tour with Cheese
from $40
7
Evening Candle Light Cruise With Wine & Cheese
from $18
8
Countryside Bike Tour from Amsterdam: Cheese, Clogs & a Windmill
from $59
What a cheese tasting actually costs, top to bottom.
Every tour on the site, grouped by price. Most of the good ones cost less than the cheese would in the airport shop on the way home.
Tasting rooms, canal boards, market walks and the entry ticket to a working dairy.
Half-day dairy runs, windmill trips, cheese-making classes and the long lunches attached to them.
Private affineurs, full-day valley grazing tours and the once-a-trip meal with somebody who makes it.
Swiss cheese happens twice: in a copper vat, and in a pot at the table.
The daytime version is a dairy at Gruyères or Appenzell, where the milk arrives from herds you can see from the car park and the whole thing smells of hot whey. The evening version is a caquelon, half Gruyère and half Vacherin, and a rule about not dropping your bread that is only funny once.
Every Swiss cheese day →
Making it yourself takes two hours and ruins supermarket cheese forever.
A workshop is milk, a starter culture, rennet and a lot of waiting, and at the end you carry out something warm in a tub. Ask before you book if you avoid animal rennet, because plenty of classes use the microbial kind and will say so. Most take children, and children turn out to be very good at stretching mozzarella.
Three cheese rooms worth crossing a border for.
Tasting boards look much the same everywhere. A vault holding forty thousand wheels, a curd pulled by hand into a ball, and a copper vat under an alp do not.
The ageing vault
A single storehouse near Parma can hold forty thousand wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano on steel shelves eight metres high, each one turned and brushed by a robot that runs all night. The consortium taps every wheel with a small hammer at twelve months and listens; anything hollow gets its rind branded out and sold as something else. The room is cool, silent and smells of butter and stone.
- 1Tour Parmigiano Reggiano dairy and Parma ham★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 601 reviews
- 2Parmigiano Production and Parma Ham Tour & Tasting★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 554 reviews
- 3Guided group tour TastyBus: Parmesan Cheese and Parma Ham★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 241 reviews
The wax and the weighing house
Dutch cheese is sold by the wheel, and the wheels come coated in coloured wax that tells you the age before you taste it. In Alkmaar and Gouda the market squares still run the old carrying ritual on summer mornings, with sleds, white hats and a hand-clap price. In the shops the crumbly thirty-six month one is the local favourite, not the young red-wax export slab.
- 1Amsterdam Classic Saloon Boat Cruise with Drinks and Cheese★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 31,825 reviews
- 2Classic Saloon Boat Cruise with Cheese & Wine★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 27,035 reviews
- 3Guided Zaanse Schans, Windmills & Cheese Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.4 · 4,826 reviews
The caquelon
Fondue is half Gruyère, half Vacherin Fribourgeois, a splash of dry white and a scrape of garlic round the pot. Raclette is the other side of the mountain: half a wheel under a grill, the melted face scraped onto potatoes and gherkins as it goes. Both are winter food that the tourist season has pushed into July, and both are better after a cold walk.
- 1Zurich eTukTuk Private Tour – with Cheese Fondue and Wine★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 223 reviews
- 2Swiss Cheese Fondue & Wine e-Tuk-Tuk City Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 168 reviews
- 3Sunset Tour with Cheese Fondue★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 90 reviews
Cheese has a season, and so do the dairies that make it.
Alpine dairies move the herds up in June and make their best wheels through the summer, then close the mountain huts by October. Buffalo mozzarella is at its best in spring. Dutch farms and Italian ageing rooms run all year, which is what makes them the safe winter booking. Fondue is the reverse: high season is the cold half of the calendar, and a July caquelon is a tourist arrangement.
Four cheese bookings that will not wait for you.
Most of this can be arranged the night before. These four run on milking times, market calendars and rooms that hold ten people, and none of them care what time your flight lands.
- 01Tour Parmigiano Reggiano dairy and Parma hamThe making happens between six and nine in the morning, once, and the dairies cap the group at the size of the room.
- 02Guided Zaanse Schans, Windmills & Cheese TourEvery coach out of Amsterdam lands at the same hour. The early departures are the only ones where the farm is quiet.
- 03Paris Cheesemaking Workshop including Wine and Cheese Tasting with an ExpertA workshop is a bench with eight places on it. They go weeks out in summer and are not repeated later the same day.
- 04Zurich eTukTuk Private Tour – with Cheese Fondue and WineWinter tables in the mountain restaurants are booked by locals first, and the sitting is a fixed time, not a window.
By place, country and city
By kind of day, from a vat to a board
Parma, Bologna, Modena: four days that never leave the dairy belt.
Bologna
Modena
Siena
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