For me the sweetest smell in recent memory was that of cheese straws through floorboards. It was last year and I was in the basement of a house in Islington, north London, one of a dozen tasters rating anonymous sparkling wines as part of a dissertation for the mistress of the house’s Master of Wine qualification.

In one corner of the room, overlaying the prevailing smell of fermented Chardonnay and Pinot Noir juice, carbon dioxide and the bready smell of fizzy wine unleashed from being locked up in a bottle with dead yeast cells, my nostrils picked up something unexpected. Another sort of fermentation. Something lactic, cheesy, but not cheese itself. It was something more like cheese-flavoured flaky pastry. Cheese straws, surely?