FROM GRIND TO RIND FOR MAN WHO`S HAPPY TO SAY CHEESE

By Richard Wright - Friday, May 9, 2008

Richard Hodgson lovingly turns one of his Gallybagger cheeses. Picture by JENNIFER BURTON.

WIGHT LIVING
BEFORE Christmas, Richard Hodgson’s Isle of Wight Cheese Company fell victim to what could have destroyed many a fledgling business.
Listeria wasn’t much of a seasonal gift.
Now, nearly six months on, his cheese is not just the flavour of the month but of the year.
Richard continues to reap the benefit of being recognised as a precocious talent in the formerly crusty world of cheesemaking, despite the bacteria being found in one batch of his cheese before the festive season.
Richard is part of a new wave of makers of real cheese, satisfying demand for fresh tastes. Supporters of the multi-million pound renaissance include Blur bassist turned foodie Alex James, who is a great fan of the real stuff and promotes it in his newspaper column.
Richard came back to the Island less than two years ago. He wanted to be part of the cheese revolution and within months of setting up his cheese company had scooped a top award in competition with the country’s best.
But after the high, the brief low.
A batch of the prizewinning cheese was found to have listeria, the bug branded as dangerous in pregnancy and to people with damaged immune systems. It is a bacterium that is all around us and in many of us.
It came just as people were buying their Christmas cheese and Richard was bracing himself for a drop in sales.
Far from it. Only a dozen of the 230 cheeses in the recalled batch came back and there were no reports of illness. The Food Standards Agency praised him for his response. Cheese never flies out of the door in January, Richard said, but after that month, his little Queen Bower Dairy enterprise continued its growth, unchecked by unwanted bugs.
Richard, 28, is the cheese maker. His mum, Julie, makes butter and Richard has taken on part-timer Geoff Browne, so his ex-hotelier mother can at least look forward to a not-too-distant retirement.
Richard’s girlfriend, Caroline Davis, designed the cheese labels. Real wholesome, family stuff, this. Food made the right way by the right sort of people.
Richard works long hours during days that fly away because he loves cheese and making it. He’s not a fan of all the business stuff that goes with it.
A typical day during his 90-hour working week sees him drive across the downs from his Ryde home to make, mould, pierce, turn, mature, package and do all that other cheese stuff.
Richard has bounced between the Island, where he was brought up, and the north-east of England, where he was born. He did film and TV work up there.
But he left that job to return to the Island. His mum made the substantial investment that allowed conversion of the Queen Bower barn, belonging to farmer Michael Reed.
Richard buys the farmer’s Guernsey milk, unpasteurised, and it bubbles its way through a pipe from parlour to dairy.
It’s food feet, not miles. As different, well, as chalk is from cheese to distances involved in most food production and distribution these days.
It is the single source of milk that protects his IW Soft and IW Blue from the sort of bacterial risk posed by milk coming from, say, 20 different farms and only a combination of freak events can cause problems.
At Queen Bower, there is symbiosis between farmer and cheese maker. The sort of geographically and emotionally close relationship you would want for all food production.
In every unpasteurised cheese the good bugs do battle with the not so good ones. There’s balance to the process and the result is healthy good taste.
His Gallybagger cheddar takes seven months to mature and the taste of that is complemented by it sitting on sycamore all the way from Niton.
Richard supplies the delicatessens and farm shops on the Island. His cheese is sold at farmers’ markets. It goes to a network running into scores of shops on the mainland. It’s wolfed in top hotels and restaurants here too.
His cheese isn’t cheap. He would dearly love it to be but anything made completely by hand, in small batches from a more-expensive-than-average raw material, 90 per cent of which goes down the drain, and which takes weeks, or months, to be ready to sell, never will be.
While he loves making something people love to eat, he gets the odd call from people telling him his blue is mouldy. He’s not especially keen on that but realises not everyone knows, a mouldy rind is all part of the process.
Others appreciate the rind mould for what it is, a sign of a cheese in good health.
Maybe he’ll respond by altering the process slightly, keeping the blue veins but turning it more into a Cambazola, still with the penicillium but white-rinded. Mould then is either unseen or regarded as harmless because of its innocent colour.
“People really do see food differently today. They don’t expect dirt on their potatoes or carrots and most don’t recognise the mould is all part of the cheesemaking process,” said Richard, who makes a tonne of the stuff a month in summer and half that in winter.
He left behind friends in Newcastle, who still do the nine-to-five grind and envy his artisan life.
What they don’t see is 90-hour working weeks and the responsibility of keeping the whole enterprise afloat.
He would dearly have liked to go ice-skating the other day but cheese had to come first.

FROM GRIND TO RIND FOR MAN WHO`S HAPPY TO SAY CHEESE

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