Fontina cheese in the world: from Fontina Cheese to the many imitations to avoid

How many times, especially abroad, have we come across “Fontina Cheese” in a restaurant passed off as Fontina DOP from Valle d'Aosta? 

Anyone who has travelled the world a bit will sooner or later have come across a supermarket stall where a slice of fontina cheese looked an awful lot like, at least the’outward appearance, to Fontina DOP from Valle d'Aosta. 

One taste is enough, however, even to a non-expert palate, to realise that nothing about Fontina cheese has anything to do with Fontina AOC, carefully regulated and protected, which is produced in the Aosta Valley.

What is found on the market, however, the many imitations of Valle d'Aosta cheese, strongly damage the PDO of Valle d'Aosta, especially those imitations produced all’abroad using the same name improperly and sometimes resembling the original only distantly in shape and nothing more. One thing, however, cannot be imitated: milk from the Aosta Valley, the raw material, which remains unique and difficult to obtain in other parts of the world and which guarantees an inimitable flavour to Fontina PDO.

Fontina cheese in the world: where the Aosta Valley's Fontina PDO is counterfeited

Despite the fact that the Fontina PDO brand is registered in more than 80 countries around the world, there is no shortage of frauds, as detected by the PDO Producers' and Protection Consortium. The falsifications are, for the most part, cheeses that in the name recall Fontina, without possessing its quality characteristics. Where do these irregular products come from? Mostly they come from the United States and Canada, but not only there. In fact, fraud is growing in number and also geographically.

L’Italy, in general, right after France, is the most affected from counterfeiting. Some call it “agro-piracy”, and it concerns the “copyright fakes” of food. 

If one considers a European framework, Italy produces about a quarter of all products with a designation of origin.’protected origin (PDO) registered at EU level. A percentage to which must then be added the more than 400 DOC, DOCG and IGT wines and over four thousand traditional products that, although they do not have production regulations, are nevertheless registered by the Italian regions and included in a national register. 

Actually, in order to discover Italian PDO and PGI fakes, there is no need even to travel abroad: all you need is an Internet connection.

Wisconsin Fontina cheese: same name, different product

Surfing on the internet one can easily discover that in Wisconsin, USA, for example, a’imitation Fontina PDO evidently making references to the cheese from the Aosta Valley, mentioning it by name, referring to the perfect combination with polenta and citing “alpine style” in combination with fondue.

Imitation is even called “extraordinarily adaptable Italian cheese from the Valle d’Aosta in Italy”.

In Wisconsin, imitation Fontina cheese is produced according to the recipe of the cheesemakers who emigrated to the US in the 1800s, but in addition to a decidedly different origin, sites selling US cheese online often refer to “fontina cheese” as a cheese in which its flavour is often accentuated by infusions of flavourings. Nothing to do, in short, with Fontina DOP.

The (enormous) differences between Fontina cheese and the original Aosta Valley Fontina PDO

The palate is the first to notice the difference between a counterfeit Fontina and a PDO Fontina, but what are the main differences between an alpine cheese and an imitation produced under different circumstances?

The taste is very differentAlpine cheese will always have an intense aromatic flavour, resulting from the alpine herbs strong and rich in essences and pigments on which the cow grazes. These aromas, on the palate, are reminiscent of flowers and give the fine bitter aftertaste typical of Fontina PDO.

Alpine cheese is fragrant decisively while its copy smells essentially lactic, with more “buttery” hints.

The cheese that, like Fontina, comes from milk from the’alpine pasture is particularly recognisable on the basis of the paste colour, which appears as a deep yellow. The colour is due to the beta-carotenes that are abundantly present in fresh grasses. A cheese that comes from the milk of cattle fed hay or other foods such as silage will always be visually white, like the “copies” of Fontina cheese that pass themselves off as Fontina DOP.

Controls: how to recognise the falsification of Fontina PDO

Counterfeits of Fontina cheese from Valle d'Aosta are strictly controlled by the Producers and Protection Consortium of the Fontina PDO, which, with its production specifications, establishes what can be labelled as Fontina PDO and what instead turns out to be an unauthorised copy and, above all, a far cry from the characteristics that a PDO product such as Fontina, with its unmistakable and intense taste derived from alpine milk, should possess.

In recent years, scientific research has also come to the aid of a protected designation of origin: research is progressing in the direction of safeguarding Italian cheeses and protecting them from counterfeiting.

L’genetic analysis may be able to trace the DNA of milk producers. The first applications of this research, in the recent past, were precisely experimented on Fontina, a product that symbolises the quality of mountain agriculture, from researchers in the Aosta Valley.

The results of the study by the Iar of the Aosta Valley, in cooperation with a number of Swiss research institutes, make it possible to tracing the genetic heritage profile of indigenous lactic acid bacteria, This makes it possible to establish whether the cheese analysed was produced, as required by the Fontina specification, from Valle d'Aosta cows.

It is a genetic screening which, combined with other types of chemical-physical analysis, can provide irrefutable evidence capable of exposing imitations of fontina cheese cheese which, in the case of Aosta Valley Fontina PDO, are crowding the food market with imaginative, even international variants: from ‘Fontanina‘ to ‘Montanina‘, to ‘Fontina cheese from Wisconsin‘ to ‘Fontina argentina‘, a melted cheese distributed to customers of an American airline.