00:00A good cheese is a smile generator. It's nothing else than that.
00:04It just fills me the emotions from the farmers to the consumer.
00:17A small cheese factory in Castlemaine is quietly helping reshape Australia's artisan dairy industry.
00:24Renowned cheesemaker Ivan Larcher, alongside partners Gaetan Chapon and Alison Lansley,
00:29founded Long Paddock Cheese as both a production facility and training school.
00:33We are less than 100 artisan cheesemakers in Australia.
00:39To give you an idea, in France we've got a total of 5,500 farmstead slash artisan producers.
00:48What we want to avoid in any artisan cheese is taking shortcuts and cutting corners
00:53in order to have a product that has a long shelf life,
00:55but it takes the same flavours from day one to day two that doesn't stink.
01:00That is not an artisan cheese.
01:02It's the king of fermented foods because it is the most complex
01:06and you can produce an endless variety of cheese using the fermentation process.
01:12So everything from really fresh, soft, very delicate cheeses through to more aged soft cheeses
01:21that become runny and gooey and absolutely delicious when they're cut.
01:26The main identity of a cheese is linked to the taste of place or the word terroir that we often
01:34use
01:34also in the wine industry and in cheese.
01:38What's really important to know, to understand, is that the flavour development,
01:43the characteristics of the different flavours and aromas that we will have in the cheese
01:47are the consequence of microbe development in the cheese.
01:53This is not something that can be done inside Melbourne,
01:56so we need to be out in a rural area, not too far from our source of milk,
02:03well as to see our fromagerie and the cheeses that we make.
02:07We've ended up at a wonderful place in Castlemaine called The Mill,
02:10a group of artisans, so not just ourselves, but all sorts of other food and drink artisans
02:17as well as artists and furniture makers and so on.
02:19A good cheese is the cheese that keeps you in business.
02:23We need to make sure that our cheese as artisans, we are colleagues,
02:27we need to work together to promote the more consumers that we can convert
02:32to switch from commodity cheese towards artisan cheese.
02:37Yeah, buy less cheese, but buy good cheese.
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