Culture Magazine

C H E E S E+ 202 2 culturecheesemag.com 29 VO I C I N G S cheese. We have an in-house grading system, we taste all the cheeses at three months old and 12 months old and make assessments. I spend a lot of my time talking actually, conversations with people about, is the milk right? Have we got the breeding right? And just now I was having a look at the woodlands with my brother. It's a real privilege for me to walk with him as he's kind of thinking out loud what his plans are. When the cows are inside, we bed them on woodchip, which keeps the animals dry but also, when you then use that dirty woodchip and put it back on the land, it really increases the soil organic matter and allows the soil microbes to access the phosphorus. I get excited about the soil. We're just learning so much cool stuff about how soil works. And, I mean, then there's emails, as few of those as I can manage. And there's a really cool project that I've created with some other colleagues in the cheese industry, very much inspired by the CCP, called Academy of Cheese. Its mummy is CCP, and its daddy is WSET (Wine and Spirit Education Trust), the Master of Wine program. So, we're [making it] accessible to consumers as well as professionals and having four levels of certification. And a model of using training partners and having it online, which is amazing because over COVID we've now had about 3,000 people studying or having studied our level one and level two. We're in the middle of writing level three. Over 80 different countries! Crazy! MQ: Yeah. I was very much inspired by coming and judging at ACS and learning about the CCP. One of the things we're doing with Academy of Cheese in the level three on maturation and affinage, we thought we'd run a little competition where ten of our cheeses from an individual vat went out to eight different people. And they're maturing them in different ways. And we're going to be coming in 11 months later, seeing what that's like. It started off because we swapped cheeses over with Jamie Montgomery, Montgomery's Cheddar, and those cheeses became completely different. The Quicke's at Montgomery's tasted different to a Montgomery's and a Quicke's. So, we got the sense that there's something really cool going on with that whole microflora that's happening on the rind. Can you talk me through the components that set your clothbound cheddar apart from say, another clothbound cheddar in the UK? MQ: That's a really interesting question because certainly milk from every farm tastes different. Of the cheddar makers, we are the ones who Photo: Matt Austin

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