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The Bleu de Termignon on the wooden counter is massive -- about 15 pounds -- and hoary with furry brown mold. Ihsan Gurdal, 43, proprietor of Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge, Mass., is excited but apprehensive. "It's made by a woman in the high Alps. She's 89 or 90 years old, and she has just nine cows. She's very frail, and if she hasn't the strength to spike the cheese, it'll have no bluing whatsoever. The last one we opened was baby-white inside. Sometimes she just forgets."

He slides a cheese plug into its flank and takes out a core. It's richly marbled. "Oh, wow." He tastes and sighs. "It's perfect." But not easy to sell, he admits -- it's too extreme. Hard-core blue fanatics will buy it -- certain acclaimed French chefs, for instance, or the MIT professor emeritus who buttonholed Gurdal and insisted that he import the cheese. "It took me three years to bring it in. The guy got mad at me; he thought I wasn't trying hard enough."

Three years is nothing to a man who has devoted his life to esoteric cheeses. Gurdal goes abroad three or four times a year -- to northern Italy, the Pyrenees, the French Alps, anywhere there are artisans handcrafting world-class cheese. In 1995, he was the first cheesemonger in the United States to create a French-style cave -- a damp and chilly little basement room reeking of cheese mold. His homely charges -- a motley assortment, from the most petite pyramids to the hugest of the rotund tommes -- are regularly flipped, brushed, washed and tasted as they await their big moment in the packed glass case upstairs, where some 300 varieties are available every day.

There's a marvelous Comté aged in a train tunnel that the producer helped to capture from the Germans. It's nutty, dense and fruity, and it's served at The French Laundry and Emeril Lagasse's restaurants. Gurdal's Tomme de Savoie has a heady, floral Alpine perfume; his Tomme de Bauges ("same mountains, different town," he says) has a lemony white-wine smell and a comparably pretty taste. He carries an exotic pecorino that's wrapped in walnut leaves and fermented in olive oil dregs for six months or more. And from a Massachussetts fine artist-cum-cheesemaker there's Colrain, a delicious new raw-milk goat cheese in a Pyrenees style that rivals the best cheeses from that region that the shop has to offer.

Although not all of Gurdal's best offerings are this rare, he clearly takes special pride in such finds. A native of Turkey, he also carries Kasar, a rich, creamy hard cheese from his homeland. "It's famous there," he boasts. "Here, no one has heard of it."

Formaggio Kitchen (the original location, plus a South Boston branch) has long been beloved by gourmets not just for its cheese, but for its handpicked inventory of hundreds of other delicacies, most of them from Europe and the United States. Change the subject to boutique French chocolates or top-grade Darjeeling teas, and Gurdal is still eager and expert. But it's the cheese he loves best. Everything in his crowded three-room original store, be it sun-dried Provence cherries, Banyuls vinegar or Tuscan red-pepper mostarda, relates, at least in his mind, to cheese.

"The Bleu de Termignon would be amazing with a Corbezzolo honey" -- that, he suggests, or another, comparably bitter chestnut honey he imports from Corsica. He takes another nibble. "My heart goes out to products like these."