We already know what the best cheese of 2026 is! The historic French mountain cheese Comté fort des rousees 24 mois from the Fromageries Arnaud dairy has won the 38th edition of the World Cheese Awards, the annual competition that this year has been doubly special because it was held in Córdoba, within the framework of the Andalucía Gusto del Sur International Cheese Festival. The Gruyère AOP Vorderfultigen Spezial, the winner of the 2025 edition, has ceded its place to this formidable cheese which obtained 81 points out of a maximum of 98 (the scores of the 14 judges ranged from 1 to 7).
This Thursday, November 14, the contest to determine the winner was held. The day was very exciting because three cheeses finished with the same score (two of them French and one Swiss), so a tiebreak was necessary. To decide it, they discarded the highest and lowest scores recorded by the three cheeses that had reached the final. Thus, finally, the Fromageries Arnaud, based in Poligny, a region in eastern France, took the top prize.
This family-owned cheesery was founded in 1907, and its main hallmark is the aging of cheeses at the Fort des Rousses, a former military fortress in the Haut-Jura converted into enormous maturation caverns, where they began aging their cheeses in 1997.
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What the World’s Best Cheese of 2026 Looks Like
Although we would have loved to see a Spanish cheese win, since the World Cheese Awards were held in Córdoba, this edition of 2026 could not deliver that. The world’s best cheese prize went rightfully to Comté fort des rousees 24 mois, a mountain cheese with a dark rind and a 24-month maturation.
During the proceedings on Thursday, the cheese was presided over by the Canary Islands’ supreme judge Rafael Domínguez González, from the Chacón e Hijo dairy, who confessed to falling in love with the cheese at first sight, “for its texture, its nuances and its complexity. An elegant cheese that stays with you for life,” he noted.
