The leaves shade russet, the sunlight compresses, and autumn’s chill fingers stroke the morning air. That can mean only one thing: the cheese review season has arrived.

We fired the starting gun on the 2021 season with a 12-cheese rating night help according to the standard gratemycheese.com ruleset. The rules are simple:

  • 2 cheeses and 1 accompaniment per person.
  • Cheeses are consumed in turn, without and with an accompaniment1.
  • Everyone gives a rating out of 10 for each modality and a justification for their score.
  • After every cheese has been tasted, a “freestyle” or “true-up” round lets people try the cheeses again in any order to recalibrate their ratings.

Biscuitry was provided by a Tesco cheese biscuit selection augmented by some Tesco Rosemary Crackers, Ritz biscuits, and the relatively small number of Hovis wheat digestives our cat hadn’t eaten earlier in the week in a poorly-scoped feline feeding frenzy. Other accompaniments included some sourdough and ciabatta bread, sun-dried tomatoes, apple and grapes.

Scores

Berthaut Époisses – 5.50 solo/6.75 accompanied

A somewhat brutal start to the night, Époisses is a French washed-rind soft cheese. It has a punishingly pungent stench but a relatively creamy smooth flavour, like a substantially tastier Brie with a bit of a sharp edge.

There’s not really any sensible way to eat this oozy soft cheese solo, but it’s, surprisingly, at least moderately enjoyable that way. It’s obviously intended for bread or cracker consumption, and did quite well there.

Mahón – 6.42/5.50

It’s great to see a genuinely novel non-standard inclusion to tickle our jaded cheese palettes. This cheese hails from the island of Menorca; the one we had was relatively firm but mild. Flavour-wise, it was slightly reminiscent of the intense saltiness of Parmesan, but a little smoother and creamier. While the aroma was appealing the actual taste was a bit underwhelming.

Brunet – 3.17/4.08

With no visible brakes attached to the train of novel cheeses, we careered straight into the path of this formidable Italian soft goat’s cheese. Its wrinkled rind reminded us strongly of a goat’s brain, while its searingly sharp aroma brought back memories of sniffing the ammonia beaker in a GCSE chemistry class because the teacher has told you not to.

This one strongly divided opinion. Hardened caprine appreciators thought its sharp, lemony, goat flavour was relatively tasty; everyone else used terms like “too much goat” and “will never eat this again”. We’d be hard-pressed to justify recommending this – especially given we got it from the Cambridge market at a price more commonly associated with extending high-speed rail infrastructure across the UK’s densely-populated countryside – but it must be said it does have a complex flavour experience and a fabulously goaty taste, if you are into that.

Lancashire Bomb – 9.17/8.42

A ludicrously tasty, strong, creamy hard cheese which exploded onto the cheese night like a bovine hand grenade. It cannot be overstated how delicious this cheese is. It’s incomprehensible that it’s actually a Lancashire – a cheese breed whose mass-market incarnations I would typically associate with feeble, crumbly, buttery, watery tedium.

We cancelled plans the next day to allow other members of our party to go and buy some of this cheese. I repeatedly described this cheese as “I guess it’s some sort of Cheddar from Lancashire” because I just couldn’t bring myself to consider the Kuhnian paradigmatic revolution this cheese implied. After eating 8 more cheeses, multiple members of the party staggered to the cheese table, wincing, groaning and clutching horrifyingly distended stomachs, to clumsily spoon out more of this delicious crumbly cheese onto their plate (or sometimes directly into their mouths), comparing side-by-side with Black Bomber Vintage Cheddar and shaking their heads in disbelief.

This is an intensely tasty, extremely mature Lancashire cheese, most proximate to a strong vintage Cheddar rather than the pointless boring Lancashires you’ve eaten before. It’s salty but not unpleasantly so, deep, rich, and highly complex. The texture is moist and crumbly, meaning it’s quite challenging to extract it from the wax bomb at a high enough rate to satisfy your needs. I suspect that using a teaspoon is probably the optimal approach to maximise intake rate. This is fantastically tasty solo, yet can hold its own with stronger accompaniments.

Dalesford Organic Cheddar – 5.50/5.08

After the intense endorphin high of the Lancashire Bomb, a cheese touted as “Ocado’s worst-reviewed Cheddar” was always going to be a rough come-down. Ocado reviewers pan this cheese as odd, weird, plasticky, generally unpleasant, or not even fit for canine consumption. We feel this is overly harsh: this is an uninteresting not-very-mature mature Cheddar with a weird flavour twist. The texture is hard and dry, and the taste is a bit odd. Ocado reviewers use terms like “mould” or “cellophane”; we preferred terms like “mustardy”

Its real tragedy is its absurdly inflated price point, around 50 % more expensive than the Lancashire Bomb. This is a grotesque situation which is, to me, a more compelling critique of the neoliberal dogma of the free market’s primacy in driving effective societal decision-making than a thousand pages of Marxist verbiage. Paying £30/kg for this is criminal insanity: £12/kg will get you a much better premium supermarket Cheddar, and £20/kg will get The Bomb, one of the best cheeses I’ve ever eaten.

Arrigoni Taleggio – 5.17/7.17

A slightly bizarre, but refreshingly innovative, addition to the cheese selection, Taleggio is a relatively mild semi-soft Italian cheese. A washed-rinder like Époisses, it possesses a ripely feety stench, but a mild and smooth flavour. Texture-wise this is satisfyingly bouncy. Lack of flavour, which could be added with a cracker, was always going to keep this from a lofty score, but it was an intriguing diversion nonetheless.

Shepherd’s Purse Harrogate Blue – 2.08/2.58

Yet another new find from the seemingly bottomless depths of Tesco’s multiple cheese aisles, this is a hard, golden blue cheese. Our audience overall leaned blue-sceptic so this was always unlikely to perform well, but even among our Team Blue advocates, this was pretty punishingly strong. The flavour is intensely salty with a rather harsh ripe blue tang. Pulling back the curtain of mould, the cheese behind it is probably quite creamy and smooth; it’s hard to appreciate this while suppressing your body’s instinctive self-preservation reflexes. One reviewer’s description of “certainly not a gateway blue” is apt. Die-hard fans of strong blues are likely to love this; everyone else will find it unsettling on a deep-seated biological level.

Proper Tasty Lancashire – 7.25/7.25

While this is certainly on a lower plane of existence to the transcendental experience the Lancashire Bomb provides, this is a Lancashire experience which could fairly be described as “proper tasty”. Lacking the strong mature flavour of The Bomb, the main taste on offer here is salt. Luckily salt tastes delicious, so that’s not a problem. This doesn’t bring a huge level of complexity into the mouth, but its unabashed down-to-earth saltiness and moist crumbliness is still welcome. Stronger crackers will overwhelm the rather simple flavour, but with mild ones this pairs great.

Belmont Red Fox – 7.33/7.67

This matured Red Leicester achieved surprisingly mixed performance across the review panel. Some felt it was just a little bit boring and mild; others raved about its great taste and incredible sandwich potential. My personal views on Red Leicester are well-known, but this is a pretty good instance of the genre if it’s something you’re into.

Black Bomber Vintage Cheddar – 8.58/8.50

A veteran of the cheese review scene, this is a great strong mature Cheddar which marries a deep, complex taste with a smooth, creamy texture. The texture and moistness is quite unusual for a Cheddar but are very enjoyable once you accept it.

I truly do feel that when I was younger, colours were brighter, children more polite, and Black Bomber Vintage Cheddars had a stronger flavour. Perhaps this is just the heavy toll decades of professional-level cheese consumption have taken on my tongue. While the flavour isn’t as overwhelmingly strong and delicious as it remains in my memory, it is very deep, layered and lingering.

Multiple people ate this back-to-back with the Lancashire Bomb. General sentiment was that the Lancashire is too crumbly to actually eat effectively, but its flavour probably is better.

Quicke’s Clothbound Goat’s Cheese 6.08/6.08

A rather crushing disappointment for the many hard goat fans around the table. Quicke’s also make a cloth-bound mature Cheddar which is pretty good: extremely hard and dry in the manner of more traditional Cheddars, rather than the moist-yet-tasty upstarts like Black Bomber. We thought that adding a goat to that winning recipe couldn’t fail to be a smash hit; sadly the goat got lost along the way. Most of us would probably struggle to pick this out as a goat’s cheese (except one reviewer, who dislikes goat’s cheese and found this “overwhelmingly goaty”). It retained the hard, crumbly texture and almost woody aroma, but flavour was rather lacking.

Doux de Montagne 6.58/6.92

A mild, buttery semi-soft cow’s milk cheese with a bouncy, slightly rubbery texture and a simple creamy flavour. This suffered somewhat from being out of the fridge for several hours and becoming sweaty and floppy (as did its reviewers). The taste is bland but quite moreish, and this was a surprisingly enjoyable coda to the actually-interesting stronger cheeses.

The following day I opened the fridge to take out the other cheeses to allow them to warm, and in passing accidentally ate the entire remnant fragment of this instantly. I definitely agree with the hypothesis that it’s much better cooler. Nothing exciting taste-wise, but it is easy to eat and has a fun texture.

1Regardless of how logistically challenging or blatantly idiotic “unaccompanied” is for a given cheese

Leave a Reply