Terroir
The idea that a cheese carries the taste of its place: soil, pasture, climate, animals and local know-how.
Also: taste of place, goût du terroir
Terroir is a French word, borrowed from wine, for everything about a place that shapes what is made there. In cheese it includes the grasses and flowers the animals graze, the breed, the climate and season, the microbes in the milk, the dairy and the cellar, and the skills and customs of the makers. Raw-milk cheeses from summer pastures are said to show it most clearly, and protected-name systems such as the PDO are built on it. Comté made in different villages, or from summer and winter milk, can taste distinctly different. The idea applies in India too: Himalayan churpi, Bengal's Bandel and Jammu's kalari each belong to their landscape.