This Italian cheesemonger plays classical music to help age his cheese

As Fiorenzo Giolito opens a nondescript metal door, he unleashes a dulcet chorus of violins, a thrilling trilling evoking birds bursting into song as the sun rises. The kick-off spring concerto in Vivaldi’s iconic The Four Seasons is accompanied by a heady swirl of aromas: Loamy, briny, vegetal, musky, and a few I can’t quite put my finger on.

Stepping over the threshold into the sounds and scents, I find myself in a small room with a red tiled floor. I am surrounded on three sides by floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves, all holding a row of neatly arranged wheels of cheese, each roughly 14 inches wide and three inches tall, some vacuum wrapped in plastic, others naked. 

All of them are listening to Vivaldi.

We are in a custom-built aging room at the back of Giolito Formaggi, my host’s renowned cheese shop in Bra, Italy, which also happens to be the birthplace of Slow Food—a now international movement focusing on local and traditional gastronomy in defiance of fast food. 

About 30 miles east of Turin, this small town with cobblestone-lined streets sits in the northwestern corner of the Italian region of Piedmont—the collar of the boot—bordering Switzerland to the north and France along its western front.

Though Giolito is pleased with the results Vivaldi produces, he’s a rock ‘n’ roller at heart. “I’d like to try this with the Rolling Stones,” he says as we exit the aging room.

The wheels of Bra Tenero cows milk cheese listen to classical music 24/7, 365 days a year.  They enjoy this cosseted lifestyle because Giolito believes the symphonic vibrations helps their rinds develop and improves their aromas. It might even alter their flavor.

“Music makes quality,” says the 71-year-old cheesemonger and formaggio expert. Now, this is not an—excuse the pun—whey off base musical conspiracy theory.  In 2019, Swiss researchers found playing various types of music, from hip hop to Mozart, to aging Emmental cheese (yellow, semi-hard) significantly altered its texture, taste, aroma, and look. 

Interestingly, it was A Tribe Called Quest’s iconic hip-hop album We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service, which produced the biggest changes in flavor and scent. The wheels subjected to the hip hop sample tested the strongest in “fruitiness”.

Though Giolito is pleased with the results Vivaldi produces, he’s a rock ‘n’ roller at heart. “I’d like to try this with the Rolling Stones,” he says as we exit the aging room and pass through the shop founded in 1920 by his grandmother, Mariet Almonte Giolito, who started by selling cheese in local farmers’ markets.

Today, Giolito Formaggi specializes in cheeses from the surrounding Piedmont region, though they do sell others from throughout the country and beyond. When I ask Giolito about the different types of Bra cheese, his eyes twinkle behind his glasses and a rakish grin spreads across his long face. A joke about cheese lingerie ensues. We laugh.

There are three types: Bra Tenero, Bra Duro and Bra d’alpeggio. Bra Tenero is soft and aged up to 45 days, Bra Duro is hard and aged for five to six months, and Bra d’alpeggio is made from the milk of grazing mountain cows. We make our way to a small tasting room with a fireplace on one side, its mantle lined with pictures of Giolito’s family and the cheese shop through the years, for a tasting of the above. 

I sit at a small wooden table and make myself comfortable while my host begins gathering a formidable array of cheeses and a bottle of local red wine. He goes to pour me a glass, but I demur; I stopped drinking a few years earlier. He seems confused. After all, in Italy, drinking wine is as commonplace as drinking water.

After a moment, he shrugs his shoulders and offers me some of the Vivaldi-aged Bra cheeses. The first is young, just a few months old. Firm, yet creamy, its flavor is restrained, but fundamentally savory. As I’m nibbling, Giolito points to the cheese wheel’s buff-hued rind. “Vivaldi helped make this,” he says. Well, Vivaldi soundwaves anyway—the mix of low, medium and high frequencies bouncing around the aging room. 

 Next up, Brachuk. This is an invention of Giolito: Brat-aged while enrobed in Barbera grape skins, a by-product of making a local wine. “I love wine; I love cheese; I love them together,” he explains.

“This is the magic of cheese. You get this taste only from there; nowhere else in the world.”

- Fiorenzo Giolito

This cheese is over a year old, a more formidable proposition. It’s creamier, its flavor vinous with an alluring acidic smack. Then we hit the hay-wrapped Bra. Its texture is even firmer, like cheddar, and carries the scent of chamomile, fields, and a fresh breeze. When it hits my tongue, it tingles, almost effervescent.

 After that, there’s a fusillade of non-Bra cheese, each more intense than the last. One is punctuated with leeks. Another is aged in chestnut leaves, creating an umami bomb that makes my head spin. There’s a well marbled goats’ milk blue cheese almost as creamy as room temp butter. That’s followed by a hearty chunk of Bettelmatt, made with milk from cows grazing in the high-altitude pastures of the Lepontine Alps. It leaves a slightly bitter aftertaste, an echo of a wild herb that grows on the mountainside.

“This is the magic of cheese,” says Giolito. “You get this taste only from there; nowhere else in the world.”

The tasting ends with a 12-year-old Bra. Slightly crumbly and crystallized with salt, I would have thought it was a well-aged parmesan if Giolito hadn’t told me otherwise. One bite is a coup de grâce. I’m done.

As I wave off his insistences I finish, Giolito gives me a look that’s part-sympathetic, part-judgmental. “Your problem is you don’t drink wine, but you’re okay,” he slaps me on the back.

I don’t need a drop of anything. I am wildly drunk on cheese. As I amble out of the shop, stomach brimming and floating somewhere north of Cloud 9, I can practically hear the joyous opening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons,  a movement fittingly titled ‘Allegro’, meaning ‘happiness’ in Italian.

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