CANADIAN CHEESE STANDS ALONE.

• It was one of Napoleon’s favourite cheeses, but French pride in their camembert has suffered a blow after a Canadian version of the soft, creamy delicacy native to Normandy was voted the world’s best.

A cheese made in Quebec has come first in the camembert category at the World Championship Cheese Contest, held in Wisconsin.

L’Extra, produced in Saint-Hyacinthe, east of Montreal, beat the top French camembert, Isigny Sainte-Mere, which won the title in 2010 but was placed only 12th this year.

Although another variety of French cheese was named the overall winner of the “world’s best cheese” award, that success was eclipsed by the sour aftertaste of losing the camembert prize.

“How can it be?” lamented the Ouest-France newspaper while the Journal du Dimanche described it as “a humiliation for France.”

The newspaper reminded its readers that Charles de Gaulle, a former president, had joked that the country was difficult to govern because it “had 258 varieties of cheese” and it said France should do more to maintain its renown as the home of cheese.

Journal du Dimanche warned that “a diplomatic crisis” had only been averted by the overall victory of Esquirrou, a hard sheep’s milk cheese that was judged the world’s best.

In contrast, Agropur, the Canadian producers, said they were savouring victory. “The creamy texture and hazelnut-and-mushroom flavour of our camembert delighted the refined taste buds of a distinguished panel of internationally known judges,” they said.

It is not the first time that a non-French camembert has won the award. German varieties came first in 2016 and 2014 and an Australian camembert triumphed in 2012. However, never before have the French seemed to find defeat so hard to digest.

And the setback has rekindled a row over whether “camembert” should be a protected geographical appellation like “champagne.” It has also prompted an outcry over whether the Canadian winner can properly be classed as camembert, given that it is made with pasteurized milk, a practice that French connoisseurs deride as a travesty. Purists, and many French consumers, believe that only unpasteurized raw milk from Normandy cows must be used to make the pungent, oozing king of soft cheeses.

However, a decade-long legal battle between Normandy’s craft dairies, which make camembert with raw milk, and mass-market rivals producing pasteurized camembert ended in defeat for the purists last month. They were forced to concede that camembert, labelled with the AOP certification of provenance, could be made with pasteurized milk.