It is a French cheese, but bought in a German supermarket. So most likely more industrial production for the mass market. It's still tasty, but probably not the best one you can buy out there.
Cheese was, and to a degree still is, stored and distributed in wheels. As a retail buyer you rarely encounter an entire wheel, but it's definitely a common sight in wholesale.
The article doesn't specifically require mold; it only argues that mold is safe if the cheese is hard and salty. It's more about how cheese that's been forgotten in the fridge actually continues to age and develop flavors -- a poor man's cheese-aging cave.
The big fun tidbit is the 40-year-old cheddar from Wisconsin, forgotten in a walk-in cooler.
I'm rather fond of a wide variety of fresh cheeses. Paneer, and other sorts of "farmers cheese" and cottage cheese are all made with just acid curdling and aren't cultured. Most mozzarella, and many other soft cheeses, can and are made without cultures.
I'm not an expert on the subject, by any means, but there's a huge variety of things we call "cheese" and they're made in a pretty wide variety of ways. More importantly might be what kinds of cheeses people were aware of and making back when this note-taker was thinking these thoughts and asking these questions about cheese. Were cultured cheeses common in his region and time? I dunno and the article doesn't reveal it. There have been times and places where "cheese" meant a fresh cheese like paneer or cottage cheese, but probably other times and places when bacterial cultures were involved in all or most cheese production. I suspect the further back we go, the more likely we are to find fresh cheeses being more common than the cultured cheeses since they were simpler to make, but I dunno. The ability to store a hard cheese without refrigeration would have been pretty valuable to pre-industrial society.
We opened a 7 year old cheese for Thanksgiving that was perfect as it is a cheese deliberately packaged to age and allow tyrosine development (which people seem to like for its bite). I've had a 30+ year version of the same cheese which was very edible and enjoyable, though you had to like a cheese with some bite. Pairs nicely with a white wine.
Would 400 year old or older cheese be good? Main thing I'd worry about is brucellosis or other contaminants.
That is the fast way. Normally it should be aged when it's still a head of cheese and not a slice in someone's fridge. Far as I can tell that takes more than a year, just because it's such a big head of cheese. The advantage of aging a mere slice is that it ages many times faster.
Fun fact: government cheese actually used to be pretty good, because it was made and stored in a cave the government owned. It turns out that caves are pretty close to the ideal place to make cheeses, so the government’s stuff wasn’t bad!
In 2004 ... Joe Schneider decided to make a raw-milk version of Stilton, the process was like trying to resurrect the dinosaurs using only a sketch of a Tyrannosaurus rex on the back of a napkin for reference. ... a raw-milk version hadn’t been made since the late nineteen-eighties
This seems overstated. I thought I was going to read this cheese was last made in the 19th century. He talks about having to rely on people for their "taste memory" and pictures, but what about written recipes and notes held over from dairies? Written reviews of the cheese? Interviews with people whose job it was to make it? Certainly, these records still exist today, let alone 16 years ago...
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