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The sunlit opening of French writer-director Louise Courvoisier’s punchy, sweet coming-of-age debut feature, “Holy Cow,” set in a cheese-making pocket of France’s Comté region, is a lively welcome.

But when Totone learns that his region’s Gruyère-like specialty can land a 30,000-euro payday from a contest, he’s spurred, with his friends’ help, to revive his family’s operation and make a prizewinning Comté cheese.

Then there’s Comté, with its smoky, umami-rich notes that deepen as the cheese matures, revealing the rich flavors of the spring milk that form its foundations.

There was also a course of cheeses - including French Comté and British Stichelton blue.

Most of us have heard of the 18th-century taxonomist Carl Linnaeus and his systems of categorization; less familiar is his rival, the French mathematician and naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon.