You can chart a cruise around France by its cheese, and I half suspect that is how the country was designed. Each coast and each river has a fromagerie that does something nobody else does, and a boat moving from Brittany to Provence passes through more distinct cheese cultures than most travellers see in a lifetime ashore. France protects 45 to 46 cheeses with an AOP, the controlled designation that ties a cheese to its place and its method, and a good number of those sit within dinghy range of a pontoon. Here is how I think about buying them as I work down the coast.
The fromagerie, not the supermarket
First, the rule that governs everything else: buy from the fromagerie, the cremerie, or the market stall, not the chiller cabinet. A proper cheesemonger keeps the cheese at the right ripeness, will tell you what is "a point" (ready to eat now) and what needs three more days, and will cut and wrap to order. Ask "qu'est-ce qui est bon en ce moment?", what is good right now, and you will be steered to the local thing at its peak rather than the same vacuum-packed wedge sold in every supermarket from Calais to Cannes. The market stall is best of all, freshest in the first hour, and it sits a hundred metres from the same morning circuit that gets you the bread, so a single run ashore can do the lot, as the boulangerie run and the cruising routine describes.
Brittany and Normandy: butter country
Start in the north, because that is where most visiting boats first land. Brittany is butter and not much cheese, but the salted butter (beurre demi-sel and the famous beurre de baratte from places like Bordier) is a serious provisioning item, and a slab keeps for weeks in a cool locker. Round the corner into Normandy and you hit the dairy heartland: Camembert de Normandie AOP, made from raw milk and sold in its wooden box, plus Pont-l'Eveque, Livarot and the heart-shaped Neufchatel. These are soft, ripe, runny cheeses that travel badly in a hot cockpit, so buy them a day or two before you eat them and keep them low in the bilge where it stays coolest.
If you are crossing from England and making landfall here, the cheese is reason enough to break the passage at a Normandy port rather than pressing straight on west.
Down the Atlantic coast: goats and the in-between
Working south from the Loire, the cheese shifts to goat. The Loire valley is chevre country, and even on the coast the markets of the Vendee and the Charente carry small, fresh goats' cheeses (crottin, Sainte-Maure de Touraine with its straw through the middle, the ash-coated rounds) that are perfect boat food: small, firm, no smell, eaten in a day. They sit well alongside the oysters and shellfish that define this stretch, and a fresh chevre with a dozen oysters from the Marennes beds is a cockpit lunch I would not swap for anything on a quay. For the eating-out side of that, the seafood restaurants with a visitor pontoon along this coast pair the same cheeses with the catch.
The Basque corner at the bottom, around Hendaye and Saint-Jean-de-Luz, brings Ossau-Iraty AOP, a firm sheep's cheese from the Pyrenees served with black cherry jam. A hard sheep's cheese is the boat cheese par excellence: it keeps for a week or more, does not weep in the heat, and grates over pasta when you are days from a shop.
Onto the Med: harder, drier, hotter
The Mediterranean changes the calculation entirely, because heat is the enemy. The soft northern cheeses turn to soup in a Provencal cockpit, so the coast itself leans drier: Banon, the little goats' cheese wrapped in chestnut leaves from the Provence hills, and the brebis (sheep's milk) cheeses that hold up better. Down here I provision differently, buying harder cheese in smaller quantities and eating it faster, because nothing survives long once the cabin hits thirty degrees.
This is also wine country at its most accessible by boat. A wedge of Banon with a glass of the local rose, sitting in a calanque, is the south in one mouthful, and if you are tasting your way along this coast the Cassis, Bandol and wine-tasting by boat routes put the cellars within a short hop of the cheese stalls.
Corsica: an island unto itself
Corsica deserves its own line. The island's cheeses are sheep and goat, strong, and proudly nothing like the mainland: Brocciu AOP, a fresh whey cheese eaten young, and a clutch of aged, pungent farmhouse rounds sold from the back of vans at island markets. Provisioning is harder here, shops are fewer and dearer, so when you find a good cheese in a Corsican port, buy enough to last the next anchorages.
The inland waterways: the full board
The canals are the cheese cruiser's dream because the boat can carry weight the sea sailor cannot, and the waterways thread straight through the great cheese regions. The Saone and the canals of Burgundy run past Epoisses, the orange washed-rind cheese so strong it is banned on French public transport, and within reach of Comte, the vast Jura mountain cheese aged in Montbeliarde and Simmental milk under rules that limit cows per hectare and ban silage. Comte is the perfect canal cheese: a kilo wheel keeps for weeks, ripens as you cruise, and gets better the longer the trip. Push east on the canals and Roquefort, the blue ewes' cheese that became the first AOC back in 1925, comes within a market's reach.
Building a cheese board at anchor
A few combinations earn their place on a cruising boat because they need no cooking, no fridge and almost no preparation, yet feel like a proper meal. The classic is three cheeses at three ages: something fresh and mild (a young chevre or a wedge of Brocciu in Corsica), something firm and savoury (Comte, Ossau-Iraty, an aged sheep's cheese), and something strong (a ripe Camembert in the north, a Roquefort or Epoisses on the canals). Add bread, a few walnuts or whatever fruit the market had, and a glass of the local wine, and that is dinner for a crew with no effort and no washing up beyond a knife.
Match the cheese to the latitude and you rarely go wrong. The runny, washed-rind cheeses belong to the cool north and the canals; the dry, firm goat and sheep cheeses belong to the hot south. A boat that buys Camembert in Provence in August deserves the soup it gets, and a boat that hauls a hard Ossau-Iraty through a Breton drizzle is missing the point of Normandy's dairy. Buy what the place does best, eat it where it grew, and the cruise writes its own menu.
One more habit worth forming: ask the monger to vacuum-seal the hard cheese you are stocking for a passage. Many fromageries and market stalls will do it for nothing, and a sealed wheel of Comte keeps for weeks in a cool locker without drying out or scenting the whole cabin. The soft cheeses cannot be treated this way and must be bought fresh and eaten fast, but a sealed hard cheese is the single most useful provisioning item you can carry into a remote stretch of coast.
Keeping cheese aboard
A few hard-won habits. Wrap cut cheese in waxed paper or its own paper, never cling film, which sweats it. Keep it low and central where the hull stays coolest, and out of the cool box if you can, because a fridge mutes the flavour and most boat fridges are too damp. Hard cheeses (Comte, Ossau-Iraty, aged sheep's cheese) are your passage cheese, good for a week or more. Soft ones (Camembert, Epoisses, fresh chevre) are buy-and-eat, gone in a day or two.
Plan it like a passage. Buy the soft cheese where you will eat it that night, and stock the hard cheese when you pass a good fromagerie, because the next one may be three anchorages and a weather window away. Do that, and the cheese counter becomes one more reason the cruise is worth slowing down for.
