If you want to taste the terroir of Ireland, raw milk farmhouse cheeses will give you the true taste of the country.
The wine writer Andrew Jefford has described terroir as “The Print of Place.” In a country with the tradition of the Naming of the Fields, terroir allows us a Tasting of the Fields. You might be sitting on the pavement of Dublin’s Drury Street, but a bite of that St Tola can transport you to County Clare, whilst a nibble of Carrignamuc will take you to the Lost Valley Dairy, in deepest West Cork.
Raw milk cheeses make “the true tastes of the earth intelligible” to quote the great French aesthete, Colette. Raw milk cheeses are the pinnacle of Irish farming, an agricultural Ulysses.
Between heaven and earth, we find grasses in the field, soaking up sunlight, drawing up minerals, making available to the ruminant animal the in-the-moment magic of photosynthesis, and the in-the-past history of geology. The cow translates the field into milk. The cheesemaker transforms the raw milk into edible art.
“When I was young and naive I didn’t think it was important,” says Dan Hegarty of Cork’s Templegall Cheese, winner of this year’s Supreme Champion Award at the bi-annual Irish Cheese Awards. “But I now think milk for us should be the same as grapes are for French.”
Templegall’s secret is: fresh grass. But it’s secret is also the most “complete control” over the quality of the milk, so Dan and his cheesemaker, Jean Baptiste, operate a closed herd. This allows the cheesemakers to bring the milk to life, capturing the sweet, refulgent, buttery notes which they then mature into as close a state of perfection as their skill allows.
Guide to Raw Milk Cheese in Ireland
There is a perception that because Ireland is a very small island, that the landscape is uniform and homogenous. In fact, the landscape is diverse, as diverse as the cheesemakers who exploit its heterogeneity to make their wildly different cheeses. Some fashion them in the Territorial style, some wash the cheese rinds, others use goat’s milk shaped into logs and festooned with ash. The stylistic diversity and the natural biodiversity are the partners who deliver truly unique flavours and textures.
These are some of the Irish raw milk cheese participating in Irish Raw Milk Cheese Week. All are available by mail order and shops from Sheridan’s Cheesemongers.
The Lost Valley Dairy
Mike and Darcie Parle went back to the 80’s when they created their cheeses, fashioning their own starter culture and working on their remote farm with just a few animals. The result has become what is probably the most cult cheese of the moment, a brilliant exploration of the potential of raw milk.
Hegarty’s Templegall
Dan Hegarty and Jean Baptiste won the Supreme Award at the 2024 Farmhouse Cheese Awards for Templegall, a cheese they have spent the best part of a decade coaxing to lactic perfection.
Young Buck
Mike Thomson tore up the rule book when he began making a raw milk blue cheese in a wee industrial estate just outside Newtownards in north County Down. Young Buck is now the most favoured artisan cheese amongst contemporary chefs.
Mount Leinster, Coolattin Creamery
Tom Burgess won the award for World’s Best Cheddar Cheese at the World Cheese Awards in Norway in 2023, yet another distinction for a cheese that has won every significant prize over the last decade. Morning milk is used during the summer months to fashion an outstanding traditional cheddar.
Knockanore Cheese
Eamonn & Patricia Lonergan are veteran cheesemakers at this stage, but their fresh and smoked cheeses are as lively and youthful as they have ever been, since they first began to create their cheeses out of their 15-field farm in County Waterford. The smoked cheese is flavoured with oak and beech woods.
Corleggy
Silke Cropp “is a true artisan producer who has never let the difficulties involved in small-scale farming and cheesemaking stand in the way of authenticity” write Kevin and Seamus Sheridan in The Sheridan’s Guide to Cheese, and they describe the flavour as “delicate and nutty, with lots of floral and grassy herbal notes.”
St Tola
Siobhan Ni Ghairbhith’s cheese spans the flavour spectrum, from soft and floral when young to flinty and agrestic when aged for about 6 weeks. Siobhan is one of the great champions of Ireland’s raw milk cheese avant garde.