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I’ve never been to the Superbowl or the World Series, but recently I was lucky to attend another exciting major world championship.  If you guessed the World Champion Cheese Contest, you’re right!  This biennial event was held in Madison this year and I was lucky to be there for one of the three days of competition.

This is the largest technical cheese, butter and yogurt competition in the world!  If you’ve never had more than Kraft singles, you might find it hard to believe that there were 3,667 entries in 132 classes of products.  The entries came from 36 states and 26 countries. 

The event was held in Monona Terrace, Madison’s Frank Lloyd Wright designed convention center.  The room was redolent with the world’s finest cheeses and filled with white-coated judges busily plying their trade.  At least one of the judges donned a pair of distinctive dairyland dungarees.

The judges didn’t just sit around in lawn chairs with plates full of cheese and cold beers, they really had a hard task to accomplish.   They worked in pairs.  If they had a wheel of cheese they would first carefully examine the outside.  Then they would insert a hollow circular boring device into the cheese and extract a sample that looked like a thin piece of string cheese.  This was not an easy task for the hard cheeses. 

They would then break off a piece of cheese and squeeze it between their fingers to feel the texture.  They also smelled the cheese.  Unfortunately I did not see any Limburger cheese.  Finally they would taste the cheese.  Each step was slow and deliberate.  Depending on the type of cheese the steps might vary.  Then they entered their impressions into their notebook computers.  Before going on to another cheese they ate slices of apple and drank some water to cleanse their palates.

After working up an appetite watching the hard work of the judges, the best part of the day was repairing to the tables full of samples.  When a plate was empty it was either immediately refilled or replaced with another cheese.  It was not necessary to take time out for lunch.

Some of the world’s finest!