This time of year, people keep coming into Scheffler’s Delicatessen & Cheese at St. Lawrence Market asking for Mont d’Or.
“Every day, all week, all month,” owner Odysseas Gounalakis said at the shop in the harried last days before Christmas.
Mont d’Or is a soft cheese from the Jura Mountains between France and Switzerland, wrapped in a ring of spruce bark, which has become a staple of holiday entertaining for his customers, often baked and served with potatoes or with bread for dipping.
But this year, when they ask, Gounalakis has to tell them there is no Mont d’Or, not at his shop, not anywhere in Canada.
“They’re in shock,” he said.
Since the middle of 2025, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has been banning all raw milk coming from France, Switzerland, Italy and Spain due to concerns about Lumpy Skin Disease.
CFIA says the virus isn’t a risk to humans, but dairy products made from unpasteurized milk can still carry the virus and inadvertently infect cattle and buffalo in Canada.
The virus can be transmitted by flying insects — like mosquitoes — and causes fever, and painful lumps that permanently damage cowhide, according to CFIA.
“The disease can spread quickly and significantly impact cattle production,” the agency said in a news release last week.
Aged raw milk cheeses are still allowed in Canada, granted they have the paperwork to prove they were made before the restrictions came into force. But fresh, unpasteurized cheeses like Mont d’Or, Reblochon, Brie de Meaux and Saint-Marcellin are forbidden.
In an email this week, CFIA said Canada and Switzerland have recently agreed to new conditions that will allow aged Swiss cheese that hasn’t been pasteurized to enter the country, regardless of when it was made. The changes don’t appear to apply to fresh cheeses like Mont d’Or.
The ban means this is the first year in roughly four decades that Toronto’s Cheese Boutique hasn’t carried Mont d’Or for Christmas, owner Afrim Pristine said in an interview this week.
It is the “cheese of the season,” he said. In December, he typically sells about 800 to 1,000 pieces, brought in from Switzerland. Mont d’Or comes in a wooden box, which can go in the oven, creating what he described as a “self-contained fondue.”
“I’ve probably said no to 300 people. It’s amazing. It’s like you’ve ruined their Christmas,” Pristine said. “We broke some hearts. … You explain it, and it’s a whole thing.”
According to the Oxford Companion to Cheese, there are two versions of Mont d’Or: one from France, also known as Vacherin du Haut-Doubs, and one from Switzerland, called Vacherin Mont d’Or.
The Swiss version uses raw cow’s milk that has been slightly heated, though not enough to be considered pasteurized, the Oxford Companion says.
The reference book’s passage on the French version notes that Mont d’Or was “regularly present at the table of Luis XV in the eighteenth century.”
Pristine said you can splash champagne on top before baking it. Some will score the top of the cheese and add rosemary, thyme, some garlic. With those flourishes or without, it’s the sort of thing you want to just eat with a spoon, he said.
“When you have it in the oven and you’re warming it up … you can smell it across the street,” he said.
In a promotional video for the cheese last December, before the CFIA ban, Pristine called Vacherin Mont d’Or “uber creamy, uber unctuous.”
“We want you to have this amazing cheese experience,” he said at the time.
But this year, Pristine has sourced another cheese for customers who come in asking for Mont d’Or. This one is made from pasteurized milk in France’s Savoie region. He admitted there is something missing, something that only comes from bacteria in unpasteurized milk.
“It’s the funk.”
