I had been raising goats for four years on the Ferme du Vert, when I decided to leave my family, my job, and my region to cycle around France and Navarre to learn the cheesemaker’s trade. I was 23 at the time. It was an emotion-packed year full of encounters with extraordinary people. I will never forget how Brother Jean-Paul, the Trappist monk greeted me at the Mont des Cats abbey in Flanders after I’d cycled all day through thunderstorms. Or learning the secrets of Reblochon cheese from Mr Paul Gay-Perret on his farm at the foot of the Col des Aravis. I can still smell the hay in his stable and see his beautiful Tarines cows in my head. Then there was Madame Poulet (aka chicken), deep in the Bray country, who was still making Neufchâtel cheese like her parents and grandparents before her. Nor will I ever forget meeting Abbé Pierre in his little house in St Wandrille. His parting words to me were: "Think of others every day.” Or Mr Touze, the last farmstead producer of Pont-l'Evêque and Pavé d'Auge, a crop and livestock farmer with strong convictions who respected traditional methods in the name of quality. And how could I possibly forget Mr Levasseur! He died the night he welcomed me into his farmhouse in Vieux-Pont-en-Auge, after an eight-year illness. All these men and women conveyed their taste for a job well done and their commitment to creating taste sensations for others. This journey - more like a rite of passage - is forever etched in my memory. I came home transformed, eager to create new cheeses with new shapes, new flavours, and new textures. Our milk-producing land was to become a land of cheese. That journey taught me to never give up. I learned that to live my dreams, you need to believe in your projects.