Boofer, a couple of interesting things - yes, I think your observation squares with mine. I had wondered about this, too, re: the very different nature of gruyere pastes, v. emmental pastes, in terms of "eyes," so this where I was going with:
I also wonder about these considerations when thinking on desired prop. metabolic effects (eyes, for example), v. flavor compounds from prop. (partial) inhibition or retardation, lysis and enzymes.
Because I suspected the latter - the higher salt inhibition/retardation of prop. is because we're looking for flavor compounds from the prop., not CO2 production (that was my question, anyway).
I also now know from comments from Francois, and from gruyere AOC info, that it's incorrect that gruyeres are "eyeless" (I actually can't quite tell from the Steves tape whether the cheese is truly eyeless, or just really, really small eyes, but no matter, really - with you, I suspect this issue of prop. retardation, and this led the original question).
As best as I can tell, I think it comes down to "how many, how big" when it comes to Gruyères. From the Swiss Gruyère (mind you - the politics aren't so buried, here!) site, once again:
Fameux dans toute la francophonie pour ses trous, le Gruyère fabriqué actuellement en Suisse n'en comporte pas… ou très peu, et de tout petits. Certes les trous étaient plus nombreux dans les Gruyères d’autrefois.
(For English speakers, "famous in French-speaking areas for its holes, Gruyère actually made in Switzerland doesn't have holes - or very few, and very small holes. To be sure, holes were more common formerly, in Gruyères.")
The other thing that is interesting me these days is the process of rind "hardening" and salt uptake. Francois, who has also been extremely generous with his help, mentioned to me that it's pretty difficult to oversalt a hard-rind wheel, when doing a dry-rub (that was comforting, in my case, as I veered my original plan too much in the way of salting, in my opinion).
Edit: FYI, if you haven't seen it, in thinking on this stuff the last few days I came across
this post of Francois's, which I thought was extraordinary, in terms of what we're talking about; from a discussion with Pav:
It has holes. Not massive swiss eyes but definite inclusions. We run a prop. culture in it here.
Here's some trivia for you. I used to live near a very old university that had a dairy history. One day the idea dawned on me that they probably had some old texts in the library that covered cheese. Off I went and low and behold, in sub-dungeon B I found the mother load. One book I recall, written in old german script on Alsace cheese, hadn't been checked out since 1941. Anyway, there was a book on swiss cheese manufacture. It talked about collecting the flowers off clover in the high alpine pastures and brewing a tea from them. The tea was then used to dose milk. I never tried it and I thought it was pretty odd. I couldn't figure out why they'd do it (flavor?). Then, while in Switzerland, I mentioned it to an old cheesemaker and he knew the answer....wild propionics. Clover is where they derived them from.
