Hello! We're Peter and Anne. We are not experts. Let's get that out of the way. Until about two years ago, "cheese" in our house meant the orange kind in the plastic sleeve and, on special occasions, a brick of Colby. Then on our tenth anniversary we went to a restaurant that brought out a cheese board after dinner, five little wedges on a wooden plank with some walnuts and a sliced pear, and Peter took one bite of the blue one and said "what IS this?" and that was that.

Since then we've had a rule: one new cheese every payday. We buy a wedge, we sit down at the kitchen table with a knife and some crackers, we taste it and we write down what we think. That's the tasting log below. We've also read every book the library has (three), driven to Wisconsin to see cheese being made, and learned to make fondue, which is the best thing we've ever done in the kitchen. This page is everything we've figured out so far, written down for anybody who's where we were two years ago. It's easier and cheaper than you think, and nobody's going to check whether you're pronouncing it right.

All cheese starts the same way: milk, something to make it curdle (rennet, or sometimes just acid), and salt. The curds get separated from the whey (the watery part), pressed or not pressed, and aged or not aged. Everything else, the thousands of kinds, comes from what milk you start with, how much water you squeeze out, and what you do to it while it sits. So there are two easy ways to sort cheeses out in your head:

By the milk.

• Cow's milk is most of what you'll find: Cheddar, Swiss types, Brie, Gouda, most blues. Mild to strong depending on age.
• Goat's milk makes cheeses that are bright and tangy, sometimes a little lemony. The fresh white logs of chèvre are goat. So are many small French cheeses.
• Sheep's milk is richer and higher in fat, and the cheeses taste nutty and a little sweet. Manchego from Spain, Pecorino Romano from Italy, and Roquefort (a blue) are sheep's milk.
• Water buffalo milk is what real Italian mozzarella di bufala is made from. We haven't found any around here yet.

By texture, which is mostly about moisture and age. Younger cheeses are softer and milder; the longer a cheese ages, the more water it loses, the firmer it gets, and the stronger and more complex it tastes.

• Fresh: no aging at all. Cottage cheese, cream cheese, ricotta, fresh mozzarella, fresh goat cheese. Mild, milky, eat within days.
• Soft-ripened: Brie and Camembert. They have a white, velvety edible rind (a mold, on purpose) and they ripen from the outside in, going from chalky in the middle to soft and runny as they age.
• Semi-soft: Havarti, Muenster, young Gouda, Fontina. Smooth, sliceable, melt like a dream.
• Semi-hard or firm: Cheddar, Gruyère, Emmentaler (the one with the holes), Manchego, aged Gouda. Most of the classics live here.
• Hard: Parmigiano-Reggiano, Pecorino Romano, aged Asiago. Aged a long time, dry and crumbly, often grated. Real Parmigiano has little crunchy crystals in it and is nothing like the stuff in the green can.
• Blue: Stilton, Roquefort, Gorgonzola, Danish blue. Veined with blue-green mold (again, on purpose; it's introduced during the making, and the wheels are pierced so air gets in and the mold grows along the holes). Salty, sharp, wonderful, and the thing that started all this for us.

Washed-rind cheeses are their own category: the orange, sticky, smelly ones like Limburger and Taleggio, which get rubbed with brine or something stronger as they age. Famous for smelling much worse than they taste. We've tried one. Once. We're working up to a second.

Take it out of the refrigerator first. This is the single biggest thing. Cold cheese tastes like almost nothing; the flavor and the aroma are locked up. Take the cheese out 30 minutes to an hour before you plan to eat it (longer for a big wedge of hard cheese, less for a fresh one) and let it come to room temperature, still wrapped or under a bowl so it doesn't dry out. The first time we did this with a Cheddar we'd been eating for a week, we couldn't believe it was the same cheese.

One knife per cheese. A blue cheese on the Brie knife makes the Brie taste like blue. Cheap butter knives are fine; you just need enough of them. Set each one down next to its cheese and leave it there.

Three to five cheeses is plenty for a board, and they should be different from each other: something soft, something firm, something blue, maybe a goat or a sheep. About an ounce or two of each per person if it's an after-dinner thing, more if it's the meal.

Arrange them mild to strong around the board, clockwise, and taste them in that order. If you eat the Stilton first you won't taste the Brie at all.

Keep the extras simple. Plain crackers or a sliced baguette (the crackers should taste like nothing; they're a delivery system). Then a few things that go with cheese: sliced apple or pear, grapes, dried apricots, walnuts or almonds, a spoonful of honey for the blue. That's it. Don't bury it.

Store it right. Rewrap cheese in waxed paper or parchment, then loosely in plastic, and keep it in the vegetable drawer. Plastic wrap directly on the cheese suffocates it and makes it taste like plastic. Hard cheeses keep for weeks; soft ones for days. If a hard cheese gets a spot of mold, cut it off with a half inch to spare and carry on. If a soft cheese does, it's done.

Cut it the right way. Everyone should get some of the middle and some of the edge, because the cheese tastes different at the rind. A wedge gets cut into long thin wedges from the point, not sliced off the nose. (Anne says nobody cares. Peter cares.)

We are even less expert about wine than about cheese, so take this for what it's worth: a few things that have worked for us at our kitchen table, plus what the books say.

• Sweet with salty. The classic is Stilton with port, and it's classic for a reason; the sweet wine tames the salt and the two together taste like a third thing entirely. Any sweet wine with any blue cheese is a safe bet. Honey does the same job if you're not drinking.
• White wine is friendlier than red. This surprised us. A crisp white (a Sauvignon Blanc, say) goes with more cheeses than a big red does, especially goat cheese and the soft ones. Big tannic reds fight with a lot of cheese.
• Match the country. Not a rule, but a good guess: Manchego with a Spanish red, Gruyère with a dry white from that part of the world, and so on. The people who made the cheese were drinking something, and they figured it out a long time ago.
• Beer. Cheddar and a good ale is one of the best combinations there is, and a lot cheaper than wine. Peter's happy about this.
• Cider with Brie or Camembert. The apple thing. Trust us.

We keep the real log in a spiral notebook, but here are the ones that we keep going back to. Scores are out of 10 and are, obviously, just what we thought. P is Peter, A is Anne.

Still on the list: Roquefort, a real Camembert, aged Gouda, Parmigiano-Reggiano (the real thing, a whole wedge), Taleggio (Peter is scared), and something with water buffalo in it. Check back.

We live a few hours south of the Wisconsin line, and it dawned on us in the spring that the state that makes more cheese than any other was right there, so in July we drove up for a long weekend. Wisconsin has cheese shops the way other states have gas stations, and most of them will let you taste anything you point at. We came home with a cooler full and a much lighter wallet.

The best part was a morning at Maple Ridge Creamery, a small family operation in the rolling farm country of Green County, in the southern part of the state. The family who runs it has been making cheese there since the 1940s. They make Cheddar and a Swiss-style cheese, and if you show up early on a make day they'll let you watch through a big window in the little shop.

What we saw, roughly: the milk (from the neighbors' farms, delivered that morning) goes into an enormous stainless steel vat, gets warmed, and gets the culture and rennet added. In about half an hour it's set like a giant pan of custard. Then a man with what look like big wire harps cuts the curd into little cubes, and it's stirred and cooked slowly while the whey separates out. The whey gets drained off (it goes to feed pigs, they told us). For Cheddar, the curd is then "cheddared": the slabs of curd are stacked and turned and stacked again, over and over, which squeezes out more whey and gives Cheddar its texture. Then the slabs are milled into fingers, salted, packed into hoops and pressed. Then it goes into a cooler to sit for months or years while it turns into the thing we tasted in January.

The smell in there is warm milk and something sour and clean. The floors are constantly being hosed. The man cutting the curd said he'd been doing it for 31 years and could tell when it was ready by how it felt on his hand. We bought a two-year Cheddar, a one-year, and a bag of fresh curds, which are eaten the same day and squeak against your teeth (that's how you know they're fresh). We ate the curds in the parking lot. That's what you do.

If you're in southern Wisconsin: go early, ask questions, buy the curds, and bring a cooler. Also there is a great deal of Swiss cheese to be had in that part of the state, for reasons that go back to the Swiss families who settled there, and you should have some.

Anne's mother had a fondue pot from the 70s in the back of a closet, and now it's on our table about twice a month from October to March. This is the classic Swiss version, and once you've done it you'll wonder why anyone stopped. Serves four as a meal, with a green salad after.

You need:

• 1/2 pound Gruyère, coarsely grated (about 2 cups)
• 1/2 pound Emmentaler (or more Gruyère), coarsely grated
• 1 clove garlic, cut in half
• 1 cup dry white wine
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• 1 tablespoon kirsch (cherry brandy; optional, but it's the traditional thing and it makes a difference)
• Fresh ground pepper and a little grated nutmeg
• A loaf of crusty bread, a day old is best, cut into bite-size cubes with crust on every piece
• A fondue pot with a burner, or a heavy saucepan and a trivet with a candle

Do this:

1. Toss the grated cheese with the cornstarch in a bowl so it's coated. This is what keeps the fondue smooth instead of stringy or separated.
2. Rub the inside of the pot all over with the cut garlic, then throw the garlic away (or leave it in; we do).
3. Pour in the wine and heat it over medium heat on the stove until it's steaming and there are little bubbles, but not a hard boil.
4. Add the cheese a handful at a time, stirring constantly in a figure-eight with a wooden spoon, and let each handful melt before you add the next. Don't rush and don't let it boil. Be patient. This takes a few minutes.
5. When it's smooth and just starting to bubble, stir in the kirsch, a few grinds of pepper and a pinch of nutmeg.
6. Carry it to the table and set it over a low flame. Everybody gets a long fork. Spear a cube of bread, swirl it around the bottom of the pot (the swirling keeps the fondue mixed), and eat.

Notes: If it gets too thick, stir in a splash of warm wine. If it separates, put it back on low heat with a teaspoon of cornstarch mixed in a little wine and stir hard. Don't put it on high heat, ever. The crust that forms at the bottom at the end is called la religieuse and it's the cook's reward. Boiled little potatoes, apple slices and cornichons are good alongside. The Swiss drink white wine or hot tea with it; the tradition says cold water gives you a stomachache, which we can neither confirm nor deny.

The rule at our table: if you lose your bread in the pot, you do the dishes.