Blessed are the cheesemakers

Cheesemaker Sue Arthur tells Kelly Dennett she nearly drove off the road when she learned one of her favourite businesses was up for sale.

Cheesemaker Sue Arthur was driving to Cambridge when she got the call that nearly had her veer off the road. ‘‘The Cheese Cartel was for sale. I was so excited.’’

A couple of years earlier, in 2019, entrepreneurs and friends Anna Guenther, Lani Evans, Hugh Evans, Jade Tang-Taylor and Silvia Zuur got together one night over glasses of wine and a cheese platter, and by accident created a cheese subscription service. Learning that the domain name, cheese cartel, was available, was like a sign.

After a Wairarapa cheese research weekend they crowd-funded $18,000 to get it off the ground. The cartel, they decided, would showcase small-scale and artisan cheesemakers across the country.

Further north, in the scenic Waikato towns of Cambridge and Puta¯ ruru, Sue Arthur was running Over the Moon Dairy, and a cheese-making school. When Cheese Cartel came up for sale, it was a no-brainer.

‘‘I knew in a minute it would make a great addition to the work we’re doing,’’ says Arthur.

‘‘For years I’ve been saying, if you just have a bricks and mortar store it’s really hard going. Businesses have to have something else they do, whether it’s online or wholesaling or some other string to their bow. Just making sales from foot traffic is really hard.

‘‘In 2019 I read a report that said the growth in online sales had been enormous. I knew my project in 2020, even before Covid came along, was to really assertively grow sales. Having the cartel just fitted that perfectly.’’

Subscribers get a monthly delivery of New Zealand’s most obscure, unusual and delicious cheeses, often made by artisan producers who you’d be unlikely to know about otherwise. Subscribers find out the week before the box arrives what cheeses they’re getting – the surprise is part of the fun – but they’re guaranteed a wellthought-out selection.

This December, Arthur is thinking along the lines of Christmas and entertaining and end-ofyear parties and sharing. The season dictates the flavour, too. Summer calls for fresh, soft, cheese. In May, cheese-lovers received a curated a box of Cheese Association gold medal awardees, and were introduced to a Geraldine deer gouda. October called for the kind of fresh cheese you can’t get in winter. The trick is also to get a varied selection, says Arthur, like an occasional blue, or a hard style, or a stinky washed rind.

She’s also trying to get products customers won’t necessarily find in the supermarket, usually made by boutique cheesemakers who sometimes make kinds so rare they may not even be on their website. What’s more, these cheesemakers are all over New Zealand.

‘‘You’d be surprised,’’ Arthur says. ‘‘People have got access to beautiful, high-quality, smallbatch-type artisan products, even if you’re in the back of the South Waikato like me, or on the West

Coast of the South Island – you have access to beautiful curated products, and you don’t have to hunt too hard for them.

‘‘The most fun part of the job is ringing up and asking what they’ve got, what they’d like to offer, anything interesting or unusual. We’d like to get a situation where we are showcasing a new cheese for them. We can do that here [at Over the Moon] as well – we can make special cheese that you won’t see anywhere else.’’

When Kaikoura Cheese closed down, Arthur, whose school had trained their cheesemaker, bought a lot of the remaining products, including the unique Candy Goddess, a semi-soft goat cheese matured and washed in a sauvignon blanc syrup. The cheese-making community in New Zealand is close-knit – after the Kaikoura earthquakes Arthur offered him the use of her factory.

Summer will see the resurgence of cheese made from goat milk. Over the Moon is the only company that continues to produce it over winter. They’re also into cow, sheep and buffalo milk. The day the Sunday Star-Times rings, it’s a special day. About once a year, if they’re lucky, they make what they call a southern cross cheese – a four-milk cheese made from cow, sheep, goat and buffalo.

‘‘I haven’t come across anything like it in the world,’’ says Arthur, ‘‘And I’ve travelled a lot, looking at cheese. We try and do it every year if the stars align. It depends on the logistics of getting the milk.’’

The cow’s milk is easy – it comes

from a farm next door in Cambridge. They get their sheep and goat milk from other parts of the Waikato. The buffalo? That’s the tricky part. The buffalo milk comes from Dairy Flat, north of central Auckland. Arthur was introduced to a farming couple there, and began turning their milk into cheese for them. The couple paid them in... more buffalo milk.

‘‘They put the buckets of milk in ice and drive them down on a Tuesday at the crack of sparrow, drop the milk off, we give them a coffee, and off they go again. They insist on doing it on a Tuesday.’’

The cheese is then aged up to a year. Buffalo makes a fresh, earthy, dense, and rich and creamy cheese. ‘‘But really mild in taste, delicate. It’s the most unusual cheese. When I give it to people in a tasting I can see a look of complete puzzlement. It’s like a roller-coaster, you don’t get the flavours at once.’’

Arthur launched Over the Moon 14 years ago, in 2008. Through the cheese school she’s noted a growing number of cheesemakers and thinks the industry is surviving the pandemic – but it’s been difficult for the smaller ones who mostly supply farmers markets.

‘‘They don’t have big distribution networks and often aren’t in big delis or supermarkets and maybe a few restaurants. We’ve been really pleased to support them through the cartel. They’re delighted when we ring them. I’ve had a few say, ‘really? You want our cheese? They’re flabbergasted.’’