The ability to select a good product, to make it unique, to refine it and make it the best product possible starting from excellent raw materials is what makes Eros a refinement artist.
The affineur, as Eros uses to say, is the person who brings the cheese “from kindergarten to university”, that is, from the cellar to the table. While the producer has the role of following the cheese during the first steps, the affineur works with already made products, taken “fuori sale”, as they say.
Eros carefully selects his producers: family businesses, mainly from Piedmont, and a great number of Ossola Valley’s companies. He prefers raw milk producers, the ones who work with non-pasteurised milk, like the Taleggio producers of Val Taleggio and Valsassina.
Eros favors local products because cheese refinement requires features that comply with the production environment. That means that the refinement of a Sicilian pecorino far from the place where they produce it would result in the product’s deterioration and in the loss of its original features.