Triumph of the little cheese: A great British success story

At best, the names evoke an earthy, rustic Britain of an earlier era - Wobbly Bottom, Yarg, Blue Vinny - while others offer a distinctly romantic sense of place - Old Winchester, Beacon Fell and Swaledale. And who could resist trying something called Stinking Bishop, because, even if it does smell of old, sweaty socks, it tastes sublime.

Now, a new name has been added to the pantheon of British cheeses: the Isle of Wight Blue, voted last week the Best English Cheese in the World Cheese Awards. It is an accolade earned after just six months in commercial production.

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This is an extraordinary achievement for the mother-and-son team behind it. But Richard Hodgson who, just over a year ago, was still a film editor in Newcastle, and his mother Julie, a former hotelier, are themselves only part of a renaissance in artisanal British cheese-making brought about mostly by people from urban backgrounds who are new to the world of matured, curdled milk.

From former hippies and accountants to a former lead violinist in the Hallé Orchestra and The Independent's own columnist Alex James, formerly of Blur (see right), there is a steady stream of cheese enthusiasts turning to cheese-makers to meet burgeoning demand.

Much of the demand has been stimulated by the growth of farmers' markets, which have awakened many consumers to locally produced, food-miles-free British foodstuffs. Supermarkets have been accused ofexcessive demands of price and quantity on small-scale producers, but some, such as Waitrose, make an effort to source local cheese, while Tesco runs an annual competition for "farmyard" makers to stock and promote the winning cheese.

As a result, the market in British artisanal cheeses is showing strong growth, registering sales of £10m last year and increasing by about 10 per cent annually. Demand for organic milk to make cheese last year grew by four million litres to 45 million, as dairy farmers, facing a glut of liquid milk, sought to add value by starting cheese production.

The British Cheese Awards began in 1994 with 97 cheese-makers exhibiting 296 cheeses; last year's awards had 178 cheese-makers entering a total of 842 cheeses; much of the increase has come in the past four or five years. There are now an estimated 450 individual cheese-makers in Britain, producing what Juliet Harbutt, founder of the awards, said was a "fantastic" array.

They range from the aforementioned Stinking Bishop from Gloucestershire, washed with perry, and the aromatic, nettle-wrapped Cornish Yarg to the Lanark Blue, redolent of the heather-covered hills of Strathclyde and only available from June to January. And that's without mentioning the feta-style Fine Fettle soft cheese from Yorkshire, the mould-covered, ash-dusted Tymboro, made on a farm near Bath from unpasteurised goat's milk, or the remarkably successful Somerset Brie.

Cheese-making is even the subject of a plotline on BBC Radio 4's The Archers, with the entrepreneurial Oliver Sterling starting a line of unpasteurised cheeses.

The story of the Isle of Wight Blue is both typical and exceptional. Typical in the zeal and determination to produce an authentic, different product, but exceptional in the very short amount of time it took Richard Hodgson to realise his dream of becoming a cheese-maker - and a successful one at that - despite his total lack of knowledge of farming or food production.

About 14 months ago, Mr Hodgson, 27, who comes from the Isle of Wight, was working in Newcastle as a film editor. But he was restless: the lure of being a cheese-maker was simply too strong. He said: "I got a bit disillusioned with what I was doing in Newcastle. I love blue cheese and always have done. We realised that no one was making cheese on the Isle of Wight and thought we should get in before anyone else.

"I packed in my career and went to live back with my parents in their bungalow. All I knew was I wanted to make cheese. It took me another year to find the right place to do it, but it's a gamble that has really paid off."

The know-how to tackle cheese-making - from bacteria starters to ageing methods - was obtained at two three-day courses at an agricultural college.

With the backing of his mother, who had sold the family's small hotel, Mr Hodgson approached one of the island's only two certified producers of unpasteurised milk to supply him. Queen Bower Farm, on the east side of the island in the Arreton Valley, is renowned for a microclimate that encourages early crops of tomatoes and garlic.

His search for a suitable premises was resolved when the farm's owner, who keeps a herd of pedigree Guernsey cows, pointed to a disused barn next to his milking parlour. Mr Hodgson, who also bought a house with his parents close to the farm, said: "It was full of hay bales and rusty old tractors but it was ideal. We converted it into a working dairy and the milk arrives through a pipe in the wall from the parlour. It travels a total of 25 feet from cow to dairy. Not so much food miles as food feet." They work 90 hours a week to produce 500 handmade, unpasteurised cheeses.

Mr Hodgson acknowledges the growth of farmers' markets as key to his success, helping him to refine his cheese. "I ask my customers what they think of it from week to week and change the recipe. The cheese that won is very different from the one I first made in September.''

His cheese came within a whisker of being declared the overall winner at the World Cheese Awards, with Charles Campion, the food critic and chairman of the judging panel, declaring: "On a blind tasting this very nearly won."

Mr Hodgson now faces the dilemma of every small producer - how do you expand to meet increased demand, while retaining the very qualities that made you successful in the first place. He is planning to double his production size, but adds: "I had an e-mail this week from someone in Florida asking if it was on sale in America. I haven't even started selling it off the Isle of Wight. But I now have a distributor interested in selling on the mainland."

The Hodgsons were not the only new cheese-makers to find success at the awards. Steven Peace and his wife, Sian, gave up careers as food consultants to set up their Pont Gar plant in Carmarthenshire, west Wales, last March. Their range of four cheeses, sold in bilingual packaging, won best Welsh cheese and are now stocked by Tesco and Waitrose with a third major supermarket to follow. Mr Peace said: "In a sense, the building of the premises and the manufacturing of the product are the easy part. You have to produce something that will have its own niche in the market - the difficult bit is getting the route to market and bringing the sales in."

According to Ms Harbutt, both these cheese-makers would be wise to follow the example of Charles Martell, the creator of Stinking Bishop, when it comes to expansion. Martell, a self-confessed child of the Sixties who got into cheese-making after deciding that his future lay in farming Gloucester cattle in the Seventies, appears to be the classic example of how to stay successful and sane.

The combination of strong smell and sensational taste created a huge demand for Stinking Bishop after it first appeared in the late Nineties - following several years doing what Mr Martell described as "fiddling about" with washing cheese in the local perry - but production is restricted to 20 tonnes or so a year by the size of the farm, and its location limits any physical expansion. Even after the cheese featured in the Wallace and Gromit film, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Mr Martell, who understands the concept of "small is beautiful", insisted, "we are really happy as we are.''

The end result is that the cheese is supplied to a few lucky outlets in Britain and around the world, and everyone else has to take their chances.

"Charles does appear to have the right model for success for those entering the business,'' said Ms Harbutt. "New producers can and do survive very well, although I would recommend that you go and spend a month working for an established producer first. It is about trying to get the right balance between production and sales. It is no use getting bigger if you cannot maintain the same artisanal feel of your product.''

But not all new entrants to the business find success. In 2000, the maker of a Cheshire cheese that had won one of the country's leading prizes for five out of six years running was forced to close down his business, complaining that consumers had been "brainwashed" into buying mass-produced cheeses.

Ms Harbutt has no patience with new producers who claim that there is no market for their cheese. "I tell them to get on the phone and to sell it - go to local shops, farmers markets, newspapers.'' She adds: "But you have to love it. Whereas wine has a vintage every year, cheese has a vintage every day, and you are only as good as your last one."

She believes that there is a fantastic diversity of cheese around the United Kingdom and has no patience with chefs who do not put British cheeses prominently on their menus.

"Many chefs think that when they are serving British cheeses they are doing them a favour. I think that is wrong, because there are fantastic British cheeses which should be available to anyone.''