Blessed are the Cheesemakers
2004


The cheese barons of the world are poised to bring our nation to its knees. The European Union, whose sole purpose for the past thirty years has been to spoil our party, claims that cheese can only bear the name of a region if it is produced in that region. Because many of the hottest cheese zones on the planet lie within the EU this is grim news for our dairy industry and all who hold cheese dear.

Imagine walking into a kiwi supermarket and the only cheddar, edam, gouda, parmesan and mozzarella you can buy is some grotty little overpriced lump of whey imported from Cheddar, Edam, Gouda, Parma or Mozz.

The only big cheese centres holding out against this name-claiming madness are those paragons of restraint, Tasty, Mild and Colby.

If we are denied our traditional cheese names what on earth will we call our dairy products? ‘Old Clandeboye’ doesn’t have the same market clout as Fine Stilton.

I could sympathise with the Europeans if the move was based on fear that their good name was being splattered over inferior products, because that’s true. Most New Zealand cheese has the texture and taste of reconstituted shopping bags. But no, this is not about quality, it’s about marketing.

We’ve been down this road before. Ten years ago the winemakers of Champagne (France) told the makers of champagne (rest of the world) to get corked. Planeloads of hairy Gallic lawyers circled the globe, pouncing upon winemakers who were innocently producing champagne in the belief that this was the appropriate name for the product.

Terrorised by the garlic-breathing notaries these winemakers spent an unhappy couple of years experimenting with sanitised forms of the name. There was a brief period when wineshops groaned with shelves of Methode Champenoise and other corruptions.

Eventually they realised that champagne by any other name still tasted as sweet, gave up pandering to the Frogs, and called their product anything they liked. We still know what we’re buying and we enjoy it as much as ever.

The real victim in this action is the Champagne tourist industry, which lost its entire market exposure practically overnight. Tourism is all about getting your name in the public eye. Here was this completely unremarkable little corner of France (I cycled through it once and didn’t even notice) whose name was everywhere. All over the world people were spending billions to promote it. Denying them the right to use the name was the equivalent of McDonalds taking down all its signs. Not a smart move.

The cheese zones need to heed this lesson, because the fact is, the Big Names in cheese are miserable little European hovels. I know this because I’ve visited most of them.

Take Parma, for example. It’s little more than a jumble of uncertain rooflines with some of the biggest potholes in northern Italy. I went there, unwillingly, about twenty years ago. I was in the company of Maurice, a Belgian architect with whom I’d thumbed a lift out of some unpronounceable Swiss yodelling mecca. Morry was heading to Rome, which was fine by me, and insisted he buy me dinner at his friend’s restaurant in Parma along the way.

I didn’t read or speak Italian but I knew it was Parma when we passed the giant fibreglass cheese grater at the edge of town. The restaurant was at the back of a derelict farmhouse and was a passable attempt at recreating the manger in Bethlehem. My dinner was cheesy, and consisted of what appeared to be a twelve metre long single strand of spaghetti floating in a puddle of warm olive oil.

There was worse to come. As we were leaving Maurice presented me with a three kilogram slab of the fromage au ville – parmesan. I protested loudly. What did I, a backpacking waif of the highway, want with 3kgs of cheese? But Maurice insisted it would bind ties between our two great nations etc etc.

I carried that block of cheese for a fortnight, paring off scrapings with my Swiss army knife and vowing that one day I would turn the incident into a highly embellished story and slip it past an unsuspecting newspaper editor (yes!!). Eventually I gave the cheese to an old lady sitting on the footpath in a Naples slum.

The point is, Parma is rubbish without the mystique of parmesan. By the same token Cheddar is a twee little place in Somerset, with a gorge that’s more like a stomach and a couple of trinket shops selling monogrammed teaspoons.

The Dutch have turned their great cheese towns into clog-and-tulip Disneylands. Every day in Edam and Gouda merry bands of outlandishly dressed peasants called Hans dance around the village square with oversized cheeses while crowds of tourists ooh and aah at the Continental charm of it all.

Clearly this madness about restricting the use of names has to be nipped in the bud before it gets out of hand. For you can be sure that when the cheese zones have locked themselves up the great smallgoods centres of Europe will want to do the same. Hitherto innocent words like hamburger and frankfurter will be taken from us. Nimes in France will insist we pay every time we say ‘denim’. And you can bet the grasping descendants of English peerage will threaten legal proceedings if we continue to call our cities Wellington, Auckland, Napier and Palmerston.

Act now. Save our cheddar.