What you should know about British cheese and the PDO
At Neal’s Yard Dairy, our mission is to improve British cheese. A major part of that mission is championing British styles like Cheshire, Lancashire, and Wensleydale. But we only stock a handful of cheeses with a protected designation of origin (PDO) label. Why? The short answer is that there’s so much more to classic British cheeses than is encompassed by their PDO status (or lack thereof).
For the long answer, we should start by defining PDO. It is a so-called "geographical indication” given to iconic foods associated with a particular process and place. Think of Parmigiano Reggiano. According to PDO requirements, Parmigiano Reggiano must be made with raw milk produced exclusively in the Italian provinces of Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna (to the west of the Reno river), and Mantua (to the east of the Po river). If a cheese doesn’t meet the requirements, it doesn’t matter how like Parmigiano Reggiano it is: it can’t be called Parmigiano Reggiano. That’s why you see inexpensive wedges of “hard Italian cheese” next to the Parmigiano Reggiano on supermarket shelves.
The United Kingdom doesn’t boast as many PDO cheeses as Italy or France. But we do have Beacon Fell Traditional Lancashire, Stilton, and West Country Farmhouse Cheddar, to name a few. These names are protected: only a select few dues-paying, audit-passing cheesemakers can use them.
Westcombe was a member of the West Country Farmhouse Cheddar PDO group before Tom Calver and his team decided not to renew their PDO status. To introduce a cheese like his Cheddar to customers, he says, "I just don't think a sticky label on the outside really cuts the mustard. To be able to communicate everything that goes into that particular flavour profile ... you need to have a human to do that. Preferably a human with a piece of cheese and a knife to shove it in someone's gob. To say, ‘look, experience this and let me tell you about it.’”
In other words, the PDO might be the start of a conversation about a cheese. It’s not the end of a conversation. And many of the British cheesemakers we work with choose to have that conversation without a PDO at all.
Why some cheesemakers opt out of PDO status
The aim of the PDO is to protect sales of regional products from corner-cutting, tradition-distorting interlopers. When you buy Beacon Fell Traditional Lancashire, you know it’s made with whole cow’s milk from the County of Lancashire. You may choose to buy it over Lancashire of unknown origin. You may even be willing to pay extra. “There's a perception of that warranting a [higher] price point,” Tom says. But if you skip over every cheese without a PDO label, you would miss out on Mrs. Kirkham’s and Lowfields Farm Lancashires – the only two raw milk farmhouse Lancashires made today, which are made on a much smaller scale.
There are many reasons cheesemakers choose not to apply for PDO status. One is price. “We were being charged a couple of grand for the process,” Tom says. “Who's actually winning out of this whole thing? It didn't feel like it was us.” A cheesemaker who could meet all the PDO requirements may not wish to pay for the label.
A wheel of clothbound Westcombe Cheddar
Another reason is the PDO requirements themselves. For Joe Schneider, the producer of Stichelton, PDO status is not an option. The PDO requirements for Stilton require that the milk is pasteurised. Because Stichelton is made with raw milk, it simply can’t qualify, no matter how historical its recipe or locally authentic its production.
Even in France, the land of fiercely protected appellations d’origine protégée, some cheesemakers, maturers, and mongers have moved past protected names. Mons – a French affineur based in Roanne – encourages their producers to send soft goat cheeses earlier than AOP rules would allow. The result is more control and better cheese. “If you have the final quality, you don’t need the designation. The cheese speaks by itself,” Fanny Thivoyon told our technical director, Bronwen Percival, in an interview for Reinventing the Wheel.
How to select a British cheese – with or without a PDO
The idea that there is one true way to make every heritage British cheese may be flawed in the first place. "There’s a really big push to say there is a definitive answer to a cheese typology, and that’s fostered by notions of PDO,” Jennifer Kast, one of the cheesemakers behind Hafod, told us when we discussed the definition of Cheddar. “Actually, if you look at the history of cheese, people were making their cheeses in a region, on separate farms. It just makes sense that there would be individual expressions of those regional cheeses within the UK.”
Rather than one version of a cheese, Jennifer described a “territorial umbrella.” There isn’t one Cheddar, but many different, equally authentic Cheddars. What’s more, Cheddar shares many characteristics with other British styles, like Cheshire. “I think if you were to go further back in time, it's more than likely that there is a sort of Venn diagram of [British cheese styles] and you would have had crossover.”
So, where does that leave us? What should you do if you want to explore real British regional cheeses – not factory-produced imitations? Tom has a simple piece of advice: “Trust people.” Our team of cheesemongers can tell you where your cheese came from, how it was made, and where it sits within the British cheese firmament.
You can explore a range of regional cheeses in our British Style Selection.