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The spruce-wrapped boxes are back in the shops. Here is how to tell the French Mont d'Or from the Swiss Vacherin Mont-d'Or, pick a good box, and bake it into the easiest cold-weather supper there is.

A whole Stilton makes a fine centrepiece, but it isn't for every household. Here's how to choose between a round and a wedge, why you should slice it rather than scoop it, and how to keep it at its best through the holidays.

Stand behind a cheese stall on a busy market Saturday and the arithmetic becomes obvious. The maker can talk to one customer at a time. The label sells to everyone else. While you explain a washed rind to one person, five others are picking up wedges, reading the wrap and deciding. That is the reality of small-batch cheese all the way through the fall market season, and it intensifies as the calendar flows into the holiday weeks, when cheese stops moving as single wedges and starts moving as boards, gift boxes and pre-orders. A supermarket cheese is sold by an aisle. A small dairy’s cheese is sold by four square inches of sticker, and that makes the label the most underrated piece of equipment on the farm.

Four protected cheeses do most of the work at a winter melting table. Here is how to tell them apart, and how to melt them without a greasy, split or stringy mess.

In much of the Northern Hemisphere, a cheese board belongs to winter evenings and holiday parties. In New Zealand, it tends to arrive with the warm weather. Christmas falls in early summer there, and a long table of cheese, cold meats, fruit and bread is a common way to feed a crowd without spending the afternoon at the stove.

The World Cheese Awards come to Córdoba in November, and Spain's protected cheeses will be playing at home. Here is what makes Manchego, Idiazábal, Cabrales and Torta del Casar distinctive, and how to taste them properly before the results land.