After sniffing my way through a tea shop, a rose emporium, a spice shop and a few glasses of wine, naturally I thought it was time to smell some cheese. I know, I know — I can hear you giggling. But let’s get the jokes about sweaty socks and “cutting the cheese” out of the way right up front, because when it comes to aroma, cheese has much more to offer than stink.

“Every cheese — and there are thousands — has a different smell,” says John Antonelli, the owner (with his wife Kendall) of Antonelli’s Cheese Shop, who was kind enough to answer my questions about how scent is important to his work as a cheesemonger. “And it’s not different as in a variation within the same spectrum, it’s different as in night and day. I mean, there are cheeses that smell like roses, there are cheeses that smell like steak, there are cheeses that smell like smoke.”

In fact, when it comes to aroma, cheese is so complex that when Antonelli trains his staff to use their noses, the first thing he tells them is to go home and “start smelling everything as often as they can.” What they need, he says, is to fill their heads with a reference library of aromas from the world around them.

The same kind of cheese can smell markedly different from maker to maker or season to season…

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