Everybody’s Talking About… New Zealand cheese – Stuff.co.nz

OPINION: Blessed are the cheesemakers, to quote Life of Brian.

This week marks the start of New Zealand Cheese Month, a month-long campaign to promote Kiwi cheese.

On one level, its not difficult to find, buy and consume our cheeses. Most of the big brands you know from the supermarket are, on some level at least, Kiwi products, in that they use milk from our farms and, in some cases, are made in our factories.

Stuff

The face of a committed eater of cheese.

Almost all of those household name brands are massive, Fonterra-owned companies such as Anchor, Mainland, Chesdale, and Kapiti, or those by offshore companies such as Tararua and Ornelle (both Goodman Fielder), or Rolling Meadow (Dairyworks).

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Theres nothing wrong with any of these brands. They are, for the most part, those that are able to produce a consistent product on a scale large enough to service dairies and supermarkets, even if family-sized blocks of your standard tasty and colby are becoming prohibitively expensive for some.

But the market dominance of these cheeses masks a brisk industry of truly local Kiwi cheesemaking.

Artisanal cheesemaking has been happening in New Zealand in some form or another since the 1970s or 1980s, but has really taken off in the past 20 years. From Mhoe in Kerikeri through Over the Moon in Ptruru, via Martinboroughs Drunken Nanny and Barrys Bay on Banks Peninsula down to Dunedins Evansdale, no matter where you live or where you are in the country, you are bound to find a cheese local to you.

Ross Giblin

A range of cheeses from The Drunken Nanny in the Wairarapa.

To a large degree, these cheesemakers are also farmers, grazing the cows, sheep, goats, even buffalo, whose milk goes into the product on the same property on which its made. Their cheeses reflect the local environment - the grasses and weather conditions. Animals grazed close to the sea will reflect that in their milk, likewise those grazed in a valley. Freed of the need to produce a predictable cheese that tastes the same every time, they can allow the changes in different seasons, year to year, to come through. They can also avoid pesticides and become organic, as an increasing number are.

As good, is the fact that you can buy many of these artisan cheeses directly from the people who make them or, if not, from a cheesemonger who knows them and their story.

Cheese should, of course, be delicious. But like many products that are, at their heart, agricultural, cheese can tell us a story: about the place it comes from, the people who make it and, in turn, about ourselves and our place.

Blessed are the cheesemakers, indeed.

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Everybody's Talking About... New Zealand cheese - Stuff.co.nz