+1 Neals Yard, always a pleasure to visit and taste and walk away a few quid worse off
Although will be giving Rippons a visit next time I’m nearby and also will be in touch with Benji.
The scarcity of decent non-cow cheese is a source of constant anguish.
My last visit to NYD saw me leave with some Quickes, as recommended above, some Stichelton, which i got very little of because my wife and kids eat it like it was supermarket stuff – and some Spenwood which is a hard pressed sheeps milk cheese from the same people who make Wigmore. That’s the joy of going to NYD (or a proper cheesemonger) – I went in wanting a cheddar, a blue and ‘something else’ and tasted loads and settled on what was good. I’d never have gone in looking for Spenwood, my knowledge isn’t that good.
Also another joy of ‘proper’ cheeses, is like wine or to an extent beer, the quality and flavour can be variable depending on how good the grass that the cows have been eating is, etc. While you can get some very tasty supermarket cheeses, most of them are specifically homogenised to make sure they’re pretty much always the same. That doesn’t make them right or wrong – just different to a hand produced single origin that IMHO have more depth of flavour and subtlety than their big cousins.