Just picture the scene – a giant room at Birmingham's NEC filled with 2,727 cheeses (the dairy intolerant should probably look away now). Giant blocks of cheddar, vast wedges of Comte, tiny rounds of Torta de trujillo: this was the truly global selection on display at the World Cheese Awards, 2015. The judges, too, had flown in from every continent, from Australia to Japan, from Canada to the Canaries. One girl, from Vermont, had just finished a PhD on cheese and was now being funded to travel the world, in search of the best.
Armed with white coats and special "cheese irons" with which to extract samples, teams gathered at vast trestle tables loaded with a dizzying range: we each had about 47 entries to grade before lunch. My table included a chirpy Swiss cheesemaker, who exuded enthusiasm and hope, and a Yorkshireman with very strong opinions about cheddar. "This one has a very weak body", he declared stridently, pressing one large block with his thumb. "Far too much moisture." We tried a 10-month Emmental which looked impressive, but failed to deliver much flavour. A couple of pots of flavoured cream cheese were swiftly dismissed, before we deliberated over some borderline feta. Finally we hit gold – a beautifully made semi-hard goats cheese with a complex, rounded flavour that just kept on giving. We crowned it our 'supergold' – one of 62 shortlisted to go before an international grand jury in the afternoon.
Those 62 were narrowed down to just 16 finalists: each one championed by a different judge, the whole thing broadcast live on a special World Cheese TV channel, hosted by Radio 2's Nigel Barden. As each one went before the jury for tasting, they held up little score cards numbered one to five: it was like the Eurovision Song Contest, but with less singing. And more cheese.
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