Someone once told me "butter is butter, it has no taste." WTF.
When I go to France, I head straight to a regular grocery store for La Peyson demi-sel — that's the butter I eat there, on bread, with everything, until it's gone. Then I find a finer shop for the real haul: Bordier or Échiré, vacuum-sealed and packed for the flight home. I've done this enough times that I have a system now. (Frozen overnight. Insulated bag in the checked suitcase. Never had a problem.)
The good butter doesn't survive long once it's home, which is why one trip I did something specific with it. We were seeing friends a few days after we landed, and I planned a blind butter tasting — Bordier, La Peyson, and a Vermont cultured butter I bought at home as the control. Fresh bread. I didn't tell them which was which.
Clear differences. Bordier won — you'd expect that. La Peyson was second, more grassy, more salt. The Vermont butter tasted so over-salted after the other two that everyone made the "ugh" face simultaneously. I made it too. We laughed for ten minutes.
The friends are still talking about that tasting. The setup cost me nothing extra — I was buying the French butter for myself anyway. The "event" was just deciding to do it with friends, blind, with fresh bread, instead of eating the butter alone in my kitchen.
Butter is definitely not butter.