This act was also a ritual. What if we traveled the world in search of stage clowns, in search of palm trees or artichokes?

With this particular whim, however, we made a pact – a six-year commitment to explore the world’s artisanal cheese towns - tasting farmhouse cheeses in the very towns where they were produced.But Jane and I are no cheese fanatics. Rather, I see cheese travels like Jerry Garcia described improvisational music – you need a thin structure and beyond that, whatever happens, let it happen.

The cheese is the note in the key, and when you end a passage, you land back on that note. For all you vegans and Cheez-Whiz bingers alike, don’t despair, for in artisanal cheese is a glimpse of humanity and the far reaches of your planet. We have selected six cheeses for the first leg of our journey. A short list of six fine cheeses in four countries.

Ibn Battutah. had a hero for his grand tour, but there is no such inspiration for a grand tour of the world’s finest cheeses. So we have to invent one.

That invention is an imaginary Maitre Fromage – an imaginary cheese expert. We named him St. Deuberex Montclair – a vaguely European gentlemen who in the year 1910, in that innocent age before the World Wars, wrote an imaginary tome called ‘The Cheese Traveler.’ In it he imagined what his circumstance as an educator never allowed him – a guideline to visiting the greatest known artisanal cheeses of the time.

Like Battutah, we also take our first steps here in Tangier, although for different reasons and in different directions. Cheese is thought to have been invented in what is now Arab Africa – perhaps as early as 8,000 B.C. But cheese has made its greatest strides in France, Italy, England and Switzerland, taking on thousands of forms and tastes. Montclair wrote, “This is why you take your first steps at the Straits of Gibraltar, where the Southern Pillar of Hercules points its cultural finger north, to Europe. You nod to the origin and you walk toward the majesty.”