What it's like to taste 700 cheeses a day

Mark Pitts-Tucker doesn’t grade cheese every day. His job also involves product development and managing the company’s entire stock – all £200,000,000 of it. But one or two days a week is dedicated to cheese grading, and a typical day could see him taste up to 700 samples.

While you might imagine tasting so many cheeses would require regular palate cleansing, he says it’s more about focus. ‘When you’re grading cheese you’ve got sample after sample after sample. Once you get the image in your head of how it should look and how it should taste, the best thing to do is to just get your head down. When you’re in that mind-set, you pick out what’s wrong and not necessarily what’s right, because you’ve got such a firm image of “it needs to be this it needs to be this”. If I get a sample that’s definitely wrong I step back for a minute, cleanse my palate and think “right, now go again”. As long as you’ve got that level of consistency you’re actually better off having that constant memory of what it should be like.’

When beginning a tasting, he starts with the cheese grader’s tool of the trade, a cheese iron, a handheld utensil that enables you to bore into the cheese and remove a piece from the centre. This is the first level of assessment, where he grades the body of the cheese. He told us: ‘The body of the cheese is the firmness and keeping quality, as well as the mouthfeel. As you push the cheese iron into the cheese you’re assessing the body, the firmness. As you turn the cheese iron you can feel the texture of the cheese, so does it glide around smoothly or is there a lot of resistance.’

Next comes the aroma: ‘When you pull the cheese up and out, you put that straight to your nose - you actually taste more through your nose than you do through your mouth. You learn an awful lot from that initial aroma. If there are any off flavours you pick that up very quickly and you get a feel for the longevity of the flavours and the quality of the flavours.’

Finally, the flavour: ‘You just snap a piece off and pop it into your mouth. You make sure that what you’re tasting is absolutely what you felt and smelled. You don’t need to swallow every bit of cheese, but when I taste the older cheeses I find it very difficult not to swallow. My cholesterol is not enviable but my bone structure is – my calcium levels are fantastic!’

It is interesting to reflect on just how important Mark’s role is for maintaining the quality and consistency of Davidstow® cheese. He explains ‘although consumers don’t always know it, the discerning human element in the middle of the cheese selection process is one of the things that brings the artisanal aspect.’

With responsibility for approving or rejecting huge volumes of product, his relationship with the manufacturers can be challenging. ‘It can be like a rocky marriage on occasions’, he told us. ‘Sometimes I need to draw the line as to what’s right and what’s not right. There’s a little bit of the man from Del Monte he say yes or he say no, but the business widely accepts that there’s little point in paying for professional advice and opinion and then ignoring it, so I’m allowed to do my job.’

One of the reasons Mark is so good at his current job is his background in cheese-making. He told us: ‘There are some people who grade cheese who’ve never made a block of cheese in their life. The fact that I’ve spend a lot of time making cheese has given me a really good empathy for the product and a feel for it. So when I taste product and I see what’s good – and also sometimes what’s not so good – I’m able to feed that back proactively to the manufacturing site and help them tweak the recipe, so my fallout rates are very low.’

When talking to Mark, what comes across most strongly is his drive for quality and consistency, even perfection. ‘I always say in life you get piano players and you get piano shifters and I’ve always set out to be a piano player. To do it absolutely as well as I can, to be as discerning as I can. Maintaining a position of excellence is never built around complacency and you need individuals in the business that drive quality, that drive consistency and that drive betterment. Doing a job to your maximum capability is not a matter of effort as it takes no longer to do the job well than it does to do it badly – it’s a mind-set. I disassociate myself with mediocrity.’

It’s hard to imagine tasting 700 samples of cheese, then sitting down to an evening meal of the same, but for Mark Pitts-Tucker, a man of unique enthusiasm who has achieved the kind of career satisfaction that many only dream of, this is a reality. He says: ‘I just love cheese and cheddar cheese particularly.’ After a long work day when the drive to cook a full meal is waning, he thinks ‘I’ve got a piece of cheese in the fridge and all I’ve got to do is open the pack, cut a few chunks off, cut a couple of bits of bread, get myself a glass of something and away I go.’

But a quick meal isn’t the only reason you’ll find a selection of cheese in Mark’s fridge. He also ages cheeses there, testing their maturation potential and developing new mature products for the company: ‘Part of learning more about cheese is pushing it to its limits and sometimes beyond, so I’ve always got that stash in the fridge that I keep longer and longer to see what it does. Maybe it’s just a feeling of inflamed superiority – knowing there’s something in my fridge that no one else has got. Occasionally, in moments of weakness, I have been known to share it. But when you become a student of your topic, you want to know more: “What if, what if… What if that happens? What if I did this? What if I changed that? What if I kept that for another year? How would that go?” The Davidstow three-year-old cheese wasn’t something that was market driven. I kept some cheese back and pushed it.’