Cheese
Some people are wine people. Some people are chocolate people. We like to think the ones who really matter are cheese people. If there’s a cheese person in your life you’ll know that the sorts of things they’re looking for don’t come from a supermarket selection box. They have opinions. Particularly strong ones. About rinds and caves and milk temperature and how long it’s been sitting in a cloth in a Somerset barn. Those opinions aren’t a problem to work around, they’re a feature. Finding them a gift that lives up to them seriously is the challenge.
We’ve built this collection with that person in mind. Not the casual buyer of hunks of cheddar from the corner shop. We’re thinking about the person who actually gets genuinely animated about affinage; who knows instinctively what they’re looking for from a Montgomery vs a Westcombe; who would rather receive one incredible thing than a hamper full of stereotypes. Everything we’ve included here has been picked because it either puts an exceptional thing in their hands, or makes life with cheese even better than it already is.
That means we’ve looked at the actual food, but also the equipment around it; the boards and knives and accompaniments that actually deserve to be near something that’s this good. We’re not interested in gimmicks. The novelty cheese knife set that lives in a drawer. What we care about is the piece of kit that becomes your go-to, or the subscription that delivers something they wouldn’t normally pick themselves but which turns an otherwise mediocre February day into a reason to celebrate.
Cheese is also a gift that just feels like sharing the right way. It’s not precious. It gets sliced, unwrapped and eaten around a table with other people. For us that quality matters. The best gifts should have a life after the moment of unwrapping and a wedge of something special, well chosen, has that in spades.
We’ve kept this list small deliberately. The temptation with cheese is to cast your net wide and we think that’s a mistake. Everything in here is something we’d happily give ourselves to a real cheese person. Our friends, family, neighbours. No caveats. That’s the standard we’ve aspired to.