Birmingham, England – At the World Cheese Awards held in Birmingham, England, Rogue Creamery’s Flora Nelle received Gold in the best new blue cheese category. The World Cheese Awards is the largest and most diverse cheese competition in the world with over 2,500 entries from 34 countries.
The creamery is owned by Cary Bryant and David Gremmels and located in Central Point, Oregon. “We are honored by this recognition of Flora Nelle, an American blue that represents the flavors and terroir of our region; it is indeed a victory for a new world cheese. One that is cloaked with our grandmother's names Florence and Nelle, and we celebrate its success with their favorite vintage in hand”, stated co-owner David Gremmels after the announcement. The competition is judged by over 200 experts from every corner of the globe, and they provide invaluable feedback on the cheeses they score.
Flora Nelle is a naturally rinded pasteurized blue set with calf rennet. The paste is specked with beautiful blue blooms and blue green veins and creates savory, tropical & sweet cream flavors. The dusty rind enhances the spicy nutty and intensely blue flavors framing the Rogue Valley Terroir. Flora Nelle is handmade using milk from Noonan Farms, an organic dairy farm in Klamath Falls, Oregon. The 200 cows graze in 5000 foot elevation pastures along the Klamath River, where they eat a variety of grasses, wild herbs, and wild flowers supplemented with grass hay, alfalfa and grain grown on the ranch. The five pound (2.2 kg) wheels are made by hand and aged in specially-constructed caves. The cheese ripens from naturally occurring molds found in the Rogue River Valley and, therefore, reflects a deep connection to the land. After more than five years in the making, the recipe was finalized in September 2010 and first released just after Thanksgiving. “We had to come up with a good production cheese that not only met the flavor and aging goals, but would still be viable labor-wise; it had to be reasonable to make by hand on a commercial scale” said co-owner Cary Bryant. Before even reaching her first birthday, Flora Nelle had already won an award, second place at the 2011 U.S. Championship Cheese Contest.
Rogue Creamery was founded in 1928. The Vella family from Sonoma, California acquired it from a co-op in Southern Oregon in 1935. In the 1950s it began making some of the country’s best blue cheese. Rogue Creamery’s Rogue River Blue was crowned best in show earlier this year in Montreal, Quebec, beating out 1675 other competitors. In 2002, Ig Vella selected Cary Bryant and David Gremmels as the new owners and they now produce a variety of award-winning cheeses. They offer the only vertically integrated third party certified sustainable cheese in the U.S. Rogue Creamery is certified sustainable by Food Alliance, Steritech and organic by Oregon Tilth.
Source: Rogue Creamery