After much preparation and arrangements getting cheese shipped out for delivery to the Australian Specialty Cheese Awards judging at Werribee for Friday the 24th of August and to the Cheese Show public tasting at Ormond Hall near Prahran Melbourne for the 25th August Neil and I (Janette) headed off to Melbourne for a three day stint !
We left frost and ice bitten Lidsdale ,Tim to care for the kidding goats and the Factory dormant awaiting our return . I had spent time preparing flyers and business cards and had used the” Wow” word as a prominent theme for the flyer . It was ironic because after the three days it was a WOW time we had…(and I will up date the flyer with more Wows ha!)
We had wow fun as we learnt to navigate the Tram, Bus and Train System with our Myki Cards sooo… exiting , and on a cheese level with another achievement for the Buche Noir which made for such a moral boost and excitement at the wards dinner in Fitzroy!
We stayed in a lovely apartment , had some date dinners together , did some valuable marketing talking to retail outlets, attended the Awards Dinner and had some well timed help from close family at a massively packed cheese show in which we where able to clear out most of the stock we took.
Gracing our stall apart from our super new pull up sign designed by Nick, our web site manager ,was our most recent trophy of the night before! We entered 7 cheese styles of which two achieved Gold awards in the soft curd section, the fresh curd and the Noir. The judges take the top 6 or so cheese in each category and give them a point score . This means the majority of cheese entered don’t know how they went at all unless they get a high score and even then it’s only if you get gold or win the section that you find out how you went.
As very small cheese makers we always find this difficult because we need to know how we are grading to be able to improve .
Luck has had it though that we do very well with our soft cheese. We had others in the hard cooked section, the marinated section, the textured section and the white mould section. People tasting on the Saturday loved our cheddar , agreed the fetta was a solid lower salt healthy cheese, devoured all the white moulds and approved of the exquisite curd and so on!
We pulled out cheese from sale stock to go down as we had no surplus at this time, to take, as it’s the end of winter and goats are only just kidding,, but it was well worth it!
We learnt a lot on the public cheese tasting day and while travelling around Melbourne . Its a great place because the small deli is still in demand and there we found lots of cheese and checked out what everyone else in our small industry of -farm made cheeses was doing . Our new slogan at the show on our sign was; “Quality from our farm to your home”! Which we hope you will agree it is. We spoke to business owners who where very keen to take on our cheese so I have lots of follow up to get on with! We found that Jannei still had what it takes and its given us that power boost we need, as being so small it often feels like you are up against too much competition.
Hope you enjoy the pictures , our news update and our cheese..
Cheers from Janette at Jannei Goat Dairy.
To read the full report click here and download the pdf!