It’s still summer and I’ve just seen my first holiday decorations. I guess people are eager to make up for all the gatherings that didn’t happen last year. If you’re already thinking about autumn cheese boards and how to entertain holiday guests, serve this rising star and prove you’re an early adopter. A little bit stinky (but not too much) and extra buttery, this California newcomer makes a tasty segue to autumn.

Golden Gate, a triple-cream cow’s milk disk with a washed rind, is the newest addition to the Marin French Cheese Company lineup. Great name, no? Made with cream-enriched milk and repeatedly washed with brine during the two weeks it spends at the Petaluma creamery, Golden Gate develops a pumpkin-colored rind dusted with white mold. That golden glow comes largely from Brevibacterium linens, friendly bacteria added to the brine and present in the coastal air. Some cheesemakers rely on annatto to deepen the orange hue, but that’s not the case here.

For some oldtimers like me, Golden Gate’s debut will be bittersweet. It replaces Schloss, a similar washed-rind cheese that the company has made since 1906. Not many American cheeses have so much history.

Marin French’s cheesemakers tweaked Schloss over the years, changing its shape and adding cream, but for contemporary tastes they wanted a stronger flavor. “We decided not to try to re-do it and pass it off as the same cheese,” says Madeleine Coggins, a marketing manager for the company. Instead, they started over, with a similar recipe but a lot more B. linens. Golden Gate is “a much more punchy cheese,” says Coggins.

Each wheel of Golden Gate has a “best by” sticker, figured as 62 days past the make date. But don’t think that’s the end of the line for this cheese. “You can enjoy it well past that if you like gooey cheese,” says Coggins. In theory, it just gets more supple and stinkier.

I sampled my half-pound wheel when it was five days short of the best-by date. I wish I had waited. The aroma was garlicky and beefy, although pretty polite for a cheese of this type. I wouldn’t have minded more pungency. The rind was thin and crunchy, the interior semisoft and open. It had some give, as you can tell from the image, but it was not close to gooey. If you like oozy washed-rind cheeses with that room-filling dirty socks smell, you might want to hold onto Golden Gate for a week or two past its best-by date.

In France, triple-cream cheeses contain a minimum of 75 percent fat. (That’s in the dry part—the cheese minus its water.) In the U.S., we have no such rules and producers are free to interpret “triple cream” any way they like. Golden Gate is actually closer to what the French call a double-cream cheese, says Coggins, so don’t expect the luscious butteriness of, say, Cowgirl Creamery’s Red Hawk.

Pour a dry Riesling with Golden Gate (Trefethen makes a fine one), dry cider or a fruity saison-style beer. Look here for a list of retailers that carry or soon will carry this cheese. And if you want to experience Schloss before it vanishes forever, check the Marin French online store. There were a couple of cases left as of this posting.