Sbrinz
An extra-hard cheese, matured for at least eighteen months, mentioned as early as 1530. Rather than being sliced, it is broken into small pieces, grated or shaved into curls. Its name is said to come from Brienz; muleteers once carried it over the passes to Italy.
In a cellar in central Switzerland, the wheels stand upright on their edge, lined up like books on a shelf. Their pale rind is wiped regularly to keep it dry. Some will stay there for more than two years.
Origin
The name is said to come from Brienz, a village of the Bernese Oberland. According to Culinary Heritage of Switzerland, during the 1500s and 1600s, the cheese made in the Oberland and in central Switzerland was collected there before crossing the Alps, and its buyers in northern Italy named it after the place. Another hypothesis points to “sbrinzo”, a Lombard word for hard cheese. A “Brientzer käss” appears in the Bernese archives as early as 1530. Companies of muleteers, the Säumer, took the wheels over the Grimsel and the Gries Pass to Domodossola; their wooden barrels earned the cheese a second name, “Spalenkäse”.
Making
Three ingredients are enough, according to the Swiss PDO-PGI Association: raw milk, rennet and salt. The cows eat at least 70% local grass and hay, never silage. The milk needed for a 45-kilo wheel exceeds 600 litres. It is curdled at 32 °C, the curd is cut into grains no bigger than a pinhead, then heated to 56 °C to drive out the water and firm the paste. After pressing, the brine bath lasts fifteen to twenty days, a Swiss record according to Culinary Heritage of Switzerland, followed by a spell in a cellar at 16–18 °C where the wheels “sweat”: the fat that beads on them seals them with a natural film.
At the table
It is not sliced with a knife: it is too hard. For shops, it is cut with a saw; at home, it is grated, shaved into rolled curls or chipped into chunks with a small pointed tool. Grated, it remains the favourite; curls and chunks, for their part, are making their way onto aperitif tables.
Today
Sbrinz has been an AOP since 2002. Obwalden, Nidwalden, Lucerne, Zug and Schwyz make it, along with a few corners of St. Gallen. It matures for at least a year and a half before leaving the cellar, and its aromas open up after 22 months. In 2021, according to Culinary Heritage of Switzerland, 25 cheese dairies, 8 of them on alpine pastures, produced 1630 tonnes of it, sold mostly in Switzerland.
Sources: Culinary Heritage of Switzerland, entry “Sbrinz (AOP)”; Swiss PDO-PGI Association, factsheet “Sbrinz AOP” and leaflet “Sbrinz AOP” (2025).