Irish cheese and wine: the producers say it's most divine

Teresa Roche of Kylemore Farm Cheese, Abbey, Co Galway. Picture: Hany Marzouk

If you are an organised person, you will have most of your Christmas shopping and preparation done already.

The last items to tick off the list will usually be for consumption; the fresh fruit and vegetables for the Christmas Day spread, or perhaps the cheese and wine over the festive period.

Irish businesses are urging consumers to show their support for locally and sustainably produced goods, in what has been an incredibly difficult year.

For Teresa Roche, of Kylemore Farmhouse Cheese, the challenges of running a farm, a farm shop, and a cheese-making business persist. Nonetheless, December is a very exciting time of year for her.

The family-run dairy farm in East Galway, at the foothills of the Slieve Aughty mountains, has been producing milk for over 65 years.

With a spring-calving pedigree dairy herd, Ms Roche has a grass-fed production system that produces milk for her cheese that is inspired by the Swiss Alps.

Adding value

“I thought it was a great opportunity to try and add value to the farm and to be able to showcase our quality, raw material of milk through product,” Ms Roche said.

“I was very passionate about trying to put our community on the map and showcase what we can produce on a farm — a very sustainable and traceable product.

“I looked at lots of dairy products and I felt that with cheese, it was something that was unique.

“It’s fully produced directly from the farm, a very short supply chain, from the breeding of the cows to the milking to the cheese manufacturing.”

Teresa Roche. Picture: Hany Marzouk

Ms Roche produces a parmesan-style cheese along with a semi-hard cheese — similar to gruyère — and has now developed the Kylemore blossom offering, which has organic edible flowers on the outside.

“The edible flowers are like a herb with it. There’s a lovely aroma off it, but it’s not infused with anything. It’s just natural flowers embedded on the outside,” Ms Roche said.

“It’s typical of Switzerland, Austria, and France. So we thought we’d try and be the first in Ireland to be able to bring that over.”

Sweet and nutty, smooth and creamy is how she describes her cheese.

Versatile

With the ability to melt well, Ms Roche said she aims to create a “great versatile cheese, where you only need one cheese in your fridge — a melting cheese, an everyday cheese, for a cheese board”.

“You don’t need as many cheeses and you’re better to buy quality rather than quantity — you can eat all the rind on the outside so there’s no food waste.”

Sweetness in the cheese comes from the grass, Ms Roche explained.

“In Ireland, we’re lucky that we can produce as much grass as we do.”

Superior quality

Ms Roche is urging people to support local businesses this Christmas. In return, consumers will get superior quality and sustainably produced foods.

“If you buy a product that is being fully produced on a farm, distributed, and creating jobs in your community, you’re giving back money that will be spent around the community again,” she said.

“You are buying from a producer that is very passionate about what they do.”

It’s the passion that keeps Ms Roche going. Changes to Ireland’s nitrates derogation, along with increased costs on the farm and reduced milk prices, have created great challenges for her.

“I think the future is diversification, adding value to farms. For more and more people that are coming into agriculture, it’s not all about expansion. I think it should be about adding value,” she said.

Wicklow Way Wines

It has been difficult for many other sectors, including fruit and vegetables, where the number of growers has reduced drastically over the years.

But Brett Stephenson, of Wicklow Way Wines — who uses only Irish fruits to make his range of Móinéir Irish blackberry, raspberry, and strawberry wines — has committed to continuing to source what he needs domestically.

Brett Stephenson, co-founder of Wicklow Way Wines

Some may assume wine can only be made from grapes — which is not accurate — according to Mr Stephenson, who co-founded the winery with his wife Pamela Walsh.

“As long as we call it by the name of the berry, it’s still wine. It’s still the same process, just a different fruit,” he explained.

In fact, it’s expensive because berries are very expensive, especially when you want to stick with Irish.

“I can buy organic fruit on the continent for less money than I pay for non-organic food here.

“It’s difficult to source the amount of fruit I use, because I do 500kg pressings every week. I spend 36 hours in the winery, from the time I start to the time I leave, pressing 500kg.”

Suppliers

However, Mr Stephenson sources his fruit from growers that have “done right by me”.

Pat Clarke provides the strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries, while Des Jeffares in Co Wexford supplies blackcurrants.

Mr Stephenson forages elderberries and he is currently trying to source gooseberries.

“Gooseberries are hard to find anymore because they’ve fallen out of fashion, unfortunately,” Mr Stephenson said.

Both fresh and frozen berries can be used in wine-making — “neither of which has any bearing on the quality of the fruit”, according to Mr Stephenson.

“If you want to eat a berry in your hand, you’re obviously going to eat fresh berries. But when you make wine, especially with the berry wines, I love frozen fruit.”

There is about 1kg of fruit in every bottle, “which is not unlike” grape wine.

Irish story

The business “decided early on” to stick with Irish growers as Mr Stephenson wanted “to have an Irish story”.

“If we started going down the route of bringing in strawberries from Spain or something like that — it might be easy — but the likelihood is every third or fourth order wouldn’t arrive when I wanted it to, or it would arrive in bad shape,” he feared.

What the award-winning business is doing is certainly working, with their wines now a firm favourite.

A reluctance by wine lovers to venture out and try berry wines is based on an expectation that they are most suited as dessert wines, but this is not the case.

When pairing cheeses with his wines for the tour and tasting experiences at the winery facilities in Co Wicklow, he opts for a cheddar with the strawberry, blue cheese with the blackberry, while dark chocolate is paired with the raspberry.

These foods are all Irish, but Mr Stephenson said a focus of his is to try and source everything as close to Co Wicklow as he can.

Bunbury Boards

Meanwhile, in Co Carlow, William Bunbury is busy preparing orders for Bunbury Boards, tying all the elements of your charcuterie board together.

He is based at Lisnavagh Estate. In the 19th century, a lot of the estate became planted with trees, and now there are over 200 acres of woodland on the 550 acres of Lisnavagh farm and woodland, Mr Bunbury said.

On the site, there is the main house along with a number of cottages. There is also a farm which is worked by the family, but also by a few others whom the land is being rented to.

It was in 2000 when Mr Bunbury took over management of the estate. He decided that instead of having trees removed from the property following a storm, maybe he could “do something better” with them.

From there, the Lisnavagh Timber Project began.

He built a workshop on the site, re-purposing timber into worktops and bookshelves.

“In 2008, we thought: ‘Let’s take this a step further and see if we can put it on the shop shelf’, and we came up with the idea of a chopping board.

“We were aiming at the high end, because it was going to be a product that was going to take time and our own timber to make.”

Traceability

To add to the quality of the product, Mr Bunbury had a traceability system set up.

“We use that to basically put a number on the back of every board, so that the person who bought the board would be able to download a report on exactly where that tree was growing, why it came down, what’s been done to replace it, a photograph of the tree, and anything else that was of interest about the tree or the place it came from if it wasn’t from Lisnavagh,” Mr Bunbury explained.

The shops liked that, because it was not just definitely an Irish product — there was a story behind the tree behind the board.

The Bunbury Board team began to grow and they moved into a bigger workshop, which was built in 2010.

While the products were being sold and the business was doing well, Mr Bunbury admitted: “We just couldn’t make enough profit.”

In 2016, he decided this was now to be a “profitable hobby, not a struggling business”.

He continues to make various wooden products, “but the board would be the main thing, and the sales of those have been very much attractive enough to keep that going”.

A board for life

All of the timber Mr Bunbury has at the moment is from Lisnavagh’s own woods.

Most of the trees used would be oak, ash, beech, and sycamore, he said.

If you’re buying a board, don’t just buy it for Christmas; buy a good quality board and it will be a board for life, Mr Bunbury said.

“You can go and get a cheap chopping board for a tenner, and it lasts a while,” he said.

“Whereas I think most Irish chopping boards made of Irish hardwoods will last for a long time — there’s no reason why it can’t last 100 years,” he added.