Judge Ned and the Rolling Cheeses

Last week I was judging at the Virtual Cheese Awards. It was lucky they were virtual because, due to a bit of a scheduling mishap on my part, we were on holiday. In fact I was dually lucky, because my wife Imogen, author of the brilliant Crowther and Westerman series - a sort of eighteenth century CSI, as well as the eminently topical Russian Doll, a political thriller about the Russian Mafia set in London, available in all good book shops etc etc, had some work to do on the afternoon of the judging so I didn’t get in to trouble.

The awards were started in 2020 during That Thing, in response to a crisis in the British Cheese world, which was that with lockdown and in particular the closing of the restaurants, cheese sales had dropped off a cliff. Also, you can’t furlough cows, sheep and goats, they keep on producing milk, which needs to be made into cheese, and the makers’ stores were full to bursting. One cheesemaker I know reckoned he was about a week away from going bust. Something had to be done, and a campaign, Save the Cheese, was launched, to which the Virtual Awards made a great contribution. The British public did their duty - i.e., bought shedloads of proper good cheese, and within weeks, things were looking much better. For cheese at least. Founder Sarah de Wit decided to keep up the good work, and the Awards are now in their sixth year.

Judging cheese is not just a thinly-veiled excuse to eat lots of cheese - as if I needed one - this is serious business. Winning an award can be a great for a cheesemaker’s public profile, and their sales of course. In a wider sense competitions like this one, along with - deep breath - the Artisan Cheese Awards, the British Cheese Awards, the International Cheese and Dairy Awards, the Global Cheese Awards, and the World Cheese Awards, keep cheese in the public eye, which is where it needs to be, and then in the mouth and tum obvs. Just as importantly, the various awards provide a chance for makers to get feedback about their cheeses from a group of experts, which can be as valuable for the experienced producer as the newcomer. All of us can do with a polish now and then can’t we - otherwise it would be boring. For us cheese people awards are a great opportunity to hang out with our fellow mongers and makers, which for freelancers like me is particularly great, no longer working in a shop, I don’t get to see as much of my cheesy people as I would like, and as I have said many a time, cheese people are nice. What makes the Virtual Cheese Awards special is their virtuality, which makes them accessible and sustainable, and means that organisationally challenged mongers like me don’t miss out…

Judging is a challenge - after all you want to do your best for all the cheesemakers, and give each cheese a fair go. You have to taste mindfully, paying attention to appearance, aroma, texture, mouthfeel and flavour. We try not to use subjective judgements, like ‘I like this’ and strive to be as clear and objective as possible. Here my more florid descriptions are inappropriate, and in fact useless. There is no point in saying that this cheese is like drinking from a cool mountain spring on a hot day, we just need to know if the salting is correct, if the flavours are complex but in balance, if there is a decent length of finish, if the texture is creamy, but not claggy. You have to resort to simile to describe flavours, but these need to be communicable - if I tell you this blue tastes of digestive biscuits, marmite and bubble gum I think you’ll get what I’m saying. If I say this reminds me of going for a walk in the Hindu Kush, or my granddad’s aftershave, probably not.

This year’s judging was particularly challenging because I had just one category - blues - and there were twenty-one cheeses in it. Even I was somewhat jaded by the end. Luckily there was a very high standard among the entries, a lot of the cheeses were complex and balanced, and restrained - I am a big fan of restraint in cheese. Even more luckily I was partnered with one of my favourite judges, cheesemongers and indeed people, the excellent Ruth Raskin who is among other things, head of cheese care at the Fine Cheese Company. We seem to have a very similar taste in cheese so that judging with Ruth is always easy. We nearly always give the same marks and similar notes. Also, as you can imagine Ruth knows a thing or two about the microbial processes behind ripening cheese, and I always learn something when we work together. This time, it was more that I had my attention drawn to the way that if the blue mould isn’t getting enough space to grow. Without enough oxygen it can die off, going brownish and getting a tired musty flavour. That and a lovely new word for the lighter shade of blue - kingfisher - which I am going to treasure. As to who won, you’ll have to wait till the 17th of June to find out when you can see the live final.

As for the holiday, we were in Wells in Somerset. This remarkably pretty and friendly place seems to have stayed below the radar for now, perhaps due to its rather underwhelming billing as Britain’s smallest city. The cathedral is built in among a series of wells, and in the fifteenth century then Bishop of Bath and Wells, Thomas Bekynton set up a system that fed water from these to a fountain in the market square, and to conduits that run down all the larger streets. The soothing and cooling sound of running water is everywhere, and feels like a blessing. The cathedral itself contains many wonders, the most famous being the striking scissor arches added in the fourteenth century to prevent the tower from collapsing. The Jesse Window is one of the finest surviving examples of medieval stained glass in Europe, the ancient mechanical clock is a thing of wonder, and these are only some of the Cathedral’s attractions. The cathedral choir is justifiably famous, and going along to Evensong was a movingly beautiful experience - my order of service was soaked in tears of wonder and joy. This open inclusive cathedral welcomes people of all faiths and none at the services, so don’t be shy about going along. Also, you have to see the gardens around the wells. We had a great meal at Root, second of a trio opened by Josh Eggleton and Luke Hasell - the others are in Bristol and Bath. The ethos is ‘more veg, less meat’, the emphasis is on shared plates with an ever-changing local menu - the Old Winchester cheese croquettes with brown sauce were life-changing - and the service is quietly competent and friendly. Nice wine list too. We stayed in a lovely Airbnb near the centre of town (everything’s near the centre of town…) called the Hidey Hole which was smashing decorated with wit and whimsy, there is a SMEG oven, sharp knives, a courtyard to sit in, and crucially its old stone walls make it nice and cool. Go to Wells people. You heard it here first.

And then it was time for the cheese rolling. Which was on the May bank holiday, Monday the 25th, on Coopers Hill near Gloucester. I have always been bemused by this, after all it’s easy enough to go and buy some cheese without risking life-changing injuries. The first mention of the sport - if that is the word - is in an entry in the Worcester Journal for 1836, which describes the Coopers Hill Wake, a kind of fair, and among other attractions like the sackrace, wrestling and bobbing for oranges, announces that ‘two cheeses are to be run for’. It is generally believed to be much older than this, and my money’s on a pre-Christian rite celebrating Spring and the beginning of the year’s cheesemaking - in the old days the cheese season was restricted to Spring and Summer. In recent years it has become hugely popular, and my first inkling of the scale of this was that the police had closed off the road that leads to the bottom of the hill, and my taxi driver had to drop me a good mile or so away.

This was non-optimal as it turned out to be the hottest day in May ever, at a not at all balmy 35 degrees. I thought I’d take the scenic route, by footpath rather than road, which turned out to be a big mistake as this followed the fields and was distinctly lacking in shade. This bit felt a lot like going to an illegal rave in the 1990s, in that I was part of an impromptu group of people slogging up the hill, generally wondering if we were on the right track as there are no signs. The whole thing is completely unofficial - a rarity in compliant Britain - presumably because no one in the council wants to take any responsibility for the all but inevitable broken bones and other injuries. At the same time, it would clearly be impossible to stop the thing. There seemed quite a lot of people walking up with and behind me, but I really began to understand the scale when I heard a strange sound emanating from beyond the tree-line, which I gradually recognised as the baying of a huge crowd.

As I came reluctantly out of the shade of the trees I realised I was at the foot of Cooper’s Hill, not, as I had been hoping, at the summit. The other thing I noticed was the dense crowd pouring through the gate and onto the slopes of the hill, easily as packed as a rush-hour tube, with more and more people pressing in all the time. Because I am not insane and have an aversion to be being trapped in massive crowd on top of a hill in 35 degree heat with limited water and no toilets, I immediately abandoned the mission, and found a shady spot to sit down in, drink water and call Hunter, expecting to watch the whole thing on his monitor later. As it happened, his cameraman Nate was set up in a field a little way from the foot of the actual hill, with a view - if you had a telephoto lens - of the action. So I wandered over there and watched a couple of the - excuse the term - heats.

You’ve no doubt seen it, so I will spare you the descriptions of the headlong flight of the cheese bouncing over the tussocks and the tumbling flail of limbs and bodies in pursuit. There is one thing that video will never do justice to, which is the brutal, near vertical steepness of the slope, reaffirming my absolute commitment to never ever doing this. The races themselves last just seconds, and really what I found most fascinating was the number and enthusiasm of the spectators. Every now and again the whole area would ring to the chant of ‘cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese…’ from thousands of throats, and people really did come from all over. Hunter met an American woman whose husband was competing, the couple had come over on their honeymoon to do this; the men’s downhill was won by a German runner and the women’s by a woman from the Basque country - an excellent training ground.

A couple of races was enough for me, and on hearing that Hunter and Nate were staying for the full two hours, I decided to slope off before I succumbed to heat stroke. An hour or so later after a very lucky bus, I found myself in a shady alley outside a pub in Gloucester - the Drunken Duck if you ever happen to be that way - with a pint of teeth achingly cold lager and a smug self-satisfied demeanour.

On balance, I am glad I went along, it really is quite a spectacle, more, for me about the crowd in a way. It’s great to see that there are still rumbustious, un-regulated, pagan events here in Britain, and heartwarming to see so much enthusiasm around cheese, or at least the pursuit of it. Cheese people are nice, if occasionally a bit mental…

This week’s recommendations:

Substack: Martin’s Substack Sheer cheese porn. Martin Rossberg is a Danish-Uruguayan cheesemaker and all round lovely guy who I met at Cheese Berlin in 2025. Mostly pictorial, this is a record of his experiments in natural cheesemaking, largely based on European recipes. I want to go there.

Book: Karla’s Choice, Nick Harkaway. I don’t know about you but I’ve been jonesing for some proper Cold War vintage Le Carré recently. Boy could he swing a pen. Set after Spy Who Came In From the Cold and before TInker Tailor, this does the business. Harkaway is Le Carré’s son, a great writer himself, and in this one has done his old man proud.

Podcast: Origin Story - Two of the smartest guys in the room, Ian Dunt and Dorian Linskey host this, and every episode is great; informative, urgent, often darkly funny. This episode, part one of a pair on climate change denial feels really apposite given the weather.