I’ve recently returned from judging at the World Cheese Awards – yes these are the Olympics of the cheese world!

As judges, we work in teams of three, to identify any cheeses worthy of a gold, silver or bronze award. This involves looking at the rind and the body of the cheese, its colour, texture, consistency and, above all, its taste. This sounds very glamorous (and it is fantastic fun) but tasting 50 odd cheeses in a morning is fairly intense. Once we have ranked all of the cheeses we then return to our gold winners in order to re-taste them to determine one cheese from our table to award a Super Gold to. We sampled cheeses from all over the world all made from different milks, different ages, textures and flavours. The Super Gold from our table ended up being a fantastic ewes’ milk cheese which had been washed in honey and covered in oregano. Usually that sort of cheese wouldn’t be my cup of tea but it had really good balance, great aroma and a really long, interesting flavour. It was the stand out cheese of my morning.

After all the Super Golds have been awarded these cheeses go forward to the next round to be tasted by another team of judges. They whittle 90 cheeses down to the top 16. It is then these 16 cheeses which are tasted and judged by the Super Jury in front of a live audience.

I love watching this final stage. It’s always really fascinating to see the range of cheeses which have made it through the the final (and I love trying to spot if I recognise any!) This year 2 of our most local cheeses made it through to the top 16 – Sinodun Hill which is a goats’ milk cheese, and possibly my favourite cheese of all time, and Spenwood which is a hard ewes’ milk cheese. Unfortunately neither of them won but the Spenwood was awarded the accolade of Best British Cheese. 

The overall winner of the Awards was a top notch Le Gruyère AOP cheese. It won by a clear 5 points in the final and when I got to taste it, I must say it was exceptionally good.