Silver for Park House Cheddar at the World Cheese Awards

After a truly memorable summer which has seen a whole host of awards bestowed upon our cheeses, there was room for just one more before the end of the year and this one was the biggest of them all – the World Cheese Awards.

The Awards were originally scheduled to be held in Ukraine, however, the terrible ongoing conflict in the country meant that a new location was needed, with Newport in South Wales chosen to host the prestigious event.

The World Cheese Awards is a truly global cheese event, one which brought together an international panel of cheesemakers, retailers, buyers and food commentators to judge over 4,000 wonderful cheeses from more than 40 countries.

Torpenhow Farmhouse Dairy entered two cheeses in this year’s Awards with Darling Howe, our British Brie-style soft cheese and Park House Cheddar, both of which had collected accolades over the past year.

And it was Park House Cheddar that came away with the honours this time with a Silver Medal in the Traditional Flavoured Medium Cheddar category for cheeses made in the first six months of this year.

“Park House Cheddar was the very first cheese we made, and it still keeps on winning!” says Jenny Lee, founder, farmer and cheesemaker at Torpenhow Farmhouse Dairy.

“Cheddar is so ubiquitous and a style that you feel pretty much every cheesemaker has tried at some in their career, but it’s also a category that’s fiercely contested. To give you an idea, the other winners in this particular cheddar category included ones from here in the UK and Ireland, and also from France, Ukraine and even India.”

From the many categories and all the wonderful cheeses that need to be tasted and appraised in a single day by judges working in teams of three, 98 ‘Super Gold’ cheeses were selected, from which this year’s winner – a gruyère from Switzerland – was finally chosen.

More than just tasting each cheese, the judges look at the rind and the body, the colour of the cheese and its texture and consistency. They decide which are worthy of gold, silver and bronze, or no award at all, before selecting one ‘Super Gold’ for that particular category.

“If it sounds quite daunting then you’re absolutely right; even on the drive down to South Wales we were wondering if we had taken a step too far and being a little too ambitious by entering the Worlds.” Adds Kimberley Lattimer, Sales Manager at Torpenhow Farmhouse Dairy.

“That said, the awards the cheeses have won this year reassured us that both Darling Howe and Park House Cheddar were good enough to hold their own in any serious competition. The fact that in the summer we entered Park House Cheddar into the Cheese Awards at the Mid Somerset Show, the home of cheddar itself, and won two silver medals in the organic cheddar categories gave us a degree of confidence.”

Organic Park House Cheddar also collected a Gold Medal at the 2022 Great Yorkshire Show in the Medium Cheddar Class, another great award in a year which has seen its inclusion on the cheeseboard at one of the UK’s foremost restaurants, L’Enclume.