Trealy Farm Charcuterie is the sort of place a clever marketing man might invent. It's a bucolic Welsh longhouse in the Monmouthshire hills – there's a herd of goats in one field, a pair of enormous hairy pigs in another – and has the rural image a conglomerate might slap on its packaging to disguise the fact that they're knocking out sausages from a business park in Swindon.
At Trealy Farm Charcuterie, there's no fancy packaging. Across the farmyard from his family's kitchen, inside an old barn, is the tiny workshop where James Swift and his two butchers are turning the finest free-range, rare breed Welsh pigs into the finest free-range, rare-breed charcuterie: sausages, salamis, saucisson, prosciutto, chorizo… the list goes on. And on.
Nobody has produced charcuterie in Britain on this scale, so there were no traditional recipes, and no body of knowledge to draw on. Figuring out how to air-dry the meat in the damp Welsh hills took two years of experimentation. And a tour of Europe's finest cured meat spots. "We started off in Norcia, in Umbria," says Swift. "The grandfather at one place had been making hams all his life. And then we visited more commercial places.
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