A new name has been added to the pantheon of British cheeses: the Isle of Wight Blue, voted last week the Best English Cheese in the World Cheese Awards, it is an accolade earned after just six months in commercial production.

This is an extraordinary achievement for the mother-and-son team behind it.  But Richard Hodgson who, just over a year ago, was still a film editor in Newcastle, and his mother Julie, a former hotelier, are themselves only part of a renaissance in artisanal British cheese-making brought about mostly by people from urban backgrounds who are new to the world of matured, curdled milk.

The story of the Isle of Wight Blue is both typical and exceptional. Typical in the zeal and determination to produce an authentic, different product, but exceptional in the very short amount of time it took Richard to realise his dream of becoming a cheese-maker - and a successful one at that - despite his total lack of knowledge of farming or food production.

About 14 months ago, Richard, 27, who comes from the Isle of Wight, was working in Newcastle as a film editor. But he was restless: the lure of being a cheese-maker was simply too strong. He told the Independent:

“I got a bit disillusioned with what I was doing in Newcastle. I love blue cheese and always have done. We realised that no one was making cheese on the Isle of Wight and thought we should get in before anyone else.

“I packed in my career and went to live back with my parents in their bungalow.  All I knew was I wanted to make cheese. It took me another year to find the right place to do it, but it’s a gamble that has really paid off.”

The know-how to tackle cheese-making - from bacteria starters to ageing methods - was obtained at two three-day courses at an agricultural college.

With the backing of his mother, who had sold the family’s small hotel, Richard approached one of the island’s only two certified producers of unpasteurised milk to supply him. Queen Bower Farm, on the east side of the island in the Arreton Valley, is renowned for a microclimate that encourages early crops of tomatoes and garlic.

His search for a suitable premises was resolved when the farm’s owner, who keeps a herd of pedigree Guernsey cows, pointed to a disused barn next to his milking parlour.

Richard said:

“It was full of hay bales and rusty old tractors but it was ideal, we converted it into a working dairy and the milk arrives through a pipe in the wall from the parlour.  It travels a total of 25 feet from cow to dairy, not so much food miles as food feet.” They work 90 hours a week to produce 500 handmade, unpasteurised cheeses.

He acknowledges the growth of farmers’ markets as key to his success, helping him to refine his cheese.

“I ask my customers what they think of it from week to week and change the recipe. The cheese that won is very different from the one I first made in September.”

His cheese came within a whisker of being declared the overall winner at the World Cheese Awards, with Charles Campion, the food critic and chairman of the judging panel, declaring: “On a blind tasting this very nearly won.”

Now facing the dilemma of every small producer - how do you expand to meet increased demand, while retaining the very qualities that made you successful in the first place.  Richard is planning to double his production size, but adds:

“I had an e-mail this week from someone in Florida asking if it was on sale in America. I haven’t even started selling it off the Isle of Wight. But I now have a distributor interested in selling on the mainland.”

 

Main Source: Independent

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