Alex James: How I became a big cheese

He'd always been partial to a chunk of cheddar or a half-pound of havarti. But when he moved to the country, Alex James went from armchair enthusiast to fully-fledged fanatic. Now, having sampled and graded the smelliest, gooiest, most outlandish varieties from around the world, he's bidding to join the ranks of the international cheese élite. Can he ever hope to be chairman of the board?

I like cheese. I've often said so, and it hasn't gone unnoticed. Even in Japan, where there is no exact word for "cheese", they tracked the stuff down and threw it at me on stage and presented it to me in hotel lobbies. I've had cheeses thrown at me in many countries, but I recall Japan because there it comes in tins.

Aside from the immediate hazard of low-flying, vacuum-packed camembert, I always like to keep an eye on the cheese situation at large when I'm travelling. Over the years I've had many close encounters of the curd kind.

The French have the most varieties, and they eat the most. It's difficult to say which is the cause and which is the effect, but French people eat a pound of cheese a week, on average. My heart always beats a little bit faster in the cheese aisle of a French supermarket. The Italians, too, eat more cheese than us, as do the Danes. Danish cheese is not as well known, but well worth exploring. There is a dimension to a well-stocked Danish cheeseboard that would daunt any cheese daredevil. I particularly like havarti, and for my money it's the smelliest cows' milk cheese, surpassing even the fantastic stench of the washed-rind Alsatian goo that is banned under local by-law from carriage on public transport or taxis in the place of its origin.

Smelly cheeses tend to be the most talked-about, but a mild cheddar can be just as sublime in the right context. It depends what time of day it is. The big, nasty cheeses only come out at night. In the morning, the delicate perfection of a young brie is perhaps better appreciated as a delicious butter than a cheese that packs no punch.

We tend to think of cheese other than cheddar as a bit posh. You can tell by the difference between the cheese sections at Asda and Waitrose. People are very adventurous with their crisp flavours these days, but still apparently unwilling to push the boat out into uncharted cheese territory. Cheese is simple, natural and flavoursome. When you buy it, it's ready. You don't have to cook it, peel it or wash it, and it's the tastiest substance in the universe. Nothing compares with cheese for intensity of flavour, variety of flavour, depth of flavour. It's practically miraculous.

The more I think about cheese, the more I like it, and the more I want some, which is why I'm taking matters into my own hands and venturing into the world of independent cheese-making.

All cheeses, from the terrifying moose mingers of Norway to the soft spreads of Somerset, are made from the same ingredients, and it's quite a simple process. The very first cheese was most likely made by accident from horse milk. Milk is obviously the main ingredient of cheese. It's not certain, but it seems that it has to be the milk of a ruminant, a cud-chewing mammal. There have been attempts to make human cheese, including one under the auspices of Oxford University, but no one has ever been able to get this milk to thicken and separate.

The first stage of the blessed cheese-maker's art is to select a suitable milk. Pasteurised milk produces consistent results. Unpasteurised milk is popular among the cognoscenti for exactly the opposite reason: for the subtle and exquisite variations in flavour. Like plums on a plum tree, no two raw-milk cheeses are ever exactly the same. It's relatively safe to use untreated milk. As well as allowing the flavours to develop, the final stage of a cheese's journey to the biscuit, ageing, is a curing process and, after 60 days, the inside of cheese is hostile to pathogens.

Once you've selected your milk - reindeer, camel and presumably giraffe being options - you need a bug. My collaborator, Mr Crudge, recalls seeing a goat being milked. At some point in the process it produced a fresh, steaming turd. This was quickly gathered by hand and gently squeezed above the pail. That's certainly an option, and apparently the cheese was very good, but most bacteria are also available in freeze-dried form. Some of the larger producers increase the complexity and individuality of their produce by developing their own microbes. All the same, good soft spreads can be made with plain natural yoghurt off the shelf; P roqueforti is the starter culture for all blue cheeses; and holey cheeses use a bug that converts the milk sugar, lactose, into a gas.

Once the lactobacillus has been selected and added, the milk is warmed to get things cracking. A coagulant - traditionally rennet, but now more commonly a manufactured chemical - is used to separate the mixture into curds and whey. If the whey is allowed to drain off naturally at this point, the result is fresh cream cheese.

To make cheddar, which is still the first thing that springs to mind if I hear the word cheese, there is still a whey to go. OK, no more cheesy puns, I promise.

It takes 10 litres of milk to make a kilo of cheddar. The curds are cut into blocks, which are milled into rice-grain sized pieces and heavily salted. It's then squashed back together in a press for a day or two, wrapped in muslin, smeared with lard and left to mature.

The smelly cheese family aren't pulverised at the curds-and-whey stage, they're simply bathed in saltwater, or rind-washed. A cheddar will be ripe aged three months, mature after nine months and vintage at twice that. Some cheeses are aged for longer. The fabled cheese of Zermatt is the oldest I've heard of, at 12 years. In general, the older they get, the more dry and waxy, like parmesan, they become.

Cream cheese is ready almost immediately and it's very easy to make. For something like Philadelphia, simply heat a couple of litres of milk to lukewarm in a saucepan, add a splodge of yoghurt and when the mixture thickens, strain it through a cloth and hang it so that the whey can keep dripping off. It's ready to go by the same time the next day.

Moorlands Cheesemakers, Ascott Smallholders' Supplies and several other companies will supply everything for the aspiring DIY cheese enthusiast. Like most things, though, it's pretty easy to do passably and quite difficult to do well.

The big success story of recent years is the Stinking Bishop phenomenon. The name alone is genius. It's a brilliant cheese, no doubt about it. It's not clear whether great cheese is invented or discovered, but the man behind it has resisted the temptation to can it and send it to Japan at this stage. The scarcity is part of the value.

Demand far outstrips the supply but, by its nature, Stinking Bishop is an artisan product and difficult to bring to the mass market while preserving the quality. Stinking Bishop and all the grands crus of the handmade cheese firmament are more or less alive, and their natural environment is a damp, dark cellar. That's about as far away from a supermarket shelf as you can get. Once they are clingfilmed, refrigerated and blasted with halogen photons, they're toast.

I met the cheese buyer from Marks and Spencer at a cheese traders' event and never was there a better-informed, bigger fan of all things cheesy. She had her ear close to the ground for any rumbles of breaking cheese news. It seems that the supermarkets appreciate the demand, and see it as something to capitalise on, but the super-galactic scale of the chains can't deal effectively with the garden-shed level of production.

The smallish scale of most of the UK's independent cheesemakers' operations is part of the joy. It's about creating variety and quality. In a world of mass-market sameness, these attributes are more and more highly prized, and people do seem to be willing to go to great lengths to procure fine cheese.

Of course, cheese is bad for you. Anyone who's lived in California for any length of time will try to persuade you not to mess with it. I recently took a handsome lump to a dinner party and presented it to the hostess, who was from Los Angeles. It was a pre-production sample of a mild but moreish crumbler. It had been hard-won only through my high-level cheese connectedness, and it was unique. I'd considered cutting it in half and keeping some of it, but decided that was a bit mean. It was so fluffy and exploding it would have been in all kinds of trouble when no longer intact, so I took the whole thing. She thanked me kindly but confessed she found cheese "a little too mucus-making". Not everyone likes cheese.

The most horrible cheese in the world is, without any doubt, the moose cheese of north Norway. They eat it for breakfast. I suppose those of us who like to swim in the deep end of the cheeseboard have worked our way there step-by-step, first by paddling in the rindless mild block cheddars, then splashing around in the Stilton and floating out to sea on a raft of dolcelatte before reaching gingerly for a munster or an époisses.

I'd never so much as heard of the moose-cheese series, and the breakfast bun that I took a huge, hungover chomp on contained an intermediate- to advanced-level stinker that required proper training. The taste was so alien and concentrated that my eyes nearly popped out. I couldn't swallow it and had to drink lots of water. I'm slightly ashamed to say that I still haven't been able to pluck up the courage to return to the cheese of the moose, as yet.

Until we started trying to make it on the farm, I thought I was something of a cheese expert. My bubble was burst at the judging of the Cheese of the Year awards when I was paired with a mature Welsh lady who could size up a truckle at 20 paces and deconstruct it at a sniff. We'd been nibbling our way through the cheddars and poking at the regionals all morning when something caught her eye. This'll be good, she said. She knew just by looking, from the texture of the rind, from the colour, from years of experience, that it was going to be special, and it was. It was the nicest cheese I've ever tasted.

I'd eaten rather a lot of cheese by that time, but I kept going back to check that I wasn't dreaming, having another sip of apple juice to refresh my palate, and another slither of cheese. It was always there, the same feeling. It was drug-like. Ecstasies of flavour, a slight acidity that drew moisture into my mouth, saltiness I craved and long, lingering reminders. Word soon got around, and at one point that cheese was drawing a crowd. There was nothing left of it by the end of the day; just a pile of crumbs.

Under the rules of the competition, the judging is done blind, so I've absolutely no idea what it was called. If you want to know, you'll have to go to Cheltenham this weekend. The British Cheese Festival aims to educate and inspire. There are 109 cheesemakers in attendance, cheese-making demonstrations and a treasure trove of other gourmet rarities: Arbroath smokies, Kentish ale, Welsh beef and so on, ad infinitum. Vive la différence!

The mystery cheese is definitely going to win cheese of the year. It's a three-star cheese, I'd say, worth a journey - if you like that kind of thing, that is.

The Great British Cheese Festival, sponsored by Food from Britain, will be at Montpellier Gardens, Cheltenham on 30 September and 1 October (01242 572 573; www.the cheeseweb.com; boxoffice@everymantheatre.org.uk)

A rind and a bite: the odorous world of cheese

CHEESE THROUGH THE AGES

The earliest documented evidence of cheese-making can be found on Egyptian cave murals from around 2300BC. But according to dairy historians, it started way before then. Sheep began to be domesticated in Central Asia and the Middle East around 8000BC and, between this date and 3000BC, the first attempts at cheese-making began.

By the time cheese made its way to Europe's cooler climes, it had morphed from being aggressively salted and runny to moderately flavoured and hard. The Greeks and Romans enjoyed a good cheeseboard, and there is a whole chapter in Pliny the Elder's Natural History devoted to the variety of cheeses available in the Roman Empire.

Since the time of the Romans until the invention of factory cheese in the 20th century, cheese-making was relatively unchanged, with few advancements in technique. There was, however, a flurry of new cheeses created in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Some of the best-known modern cheeses, including cheddar and parmesan, can be attributed to this era.

CHEESE FACTS

* According to the United Nations, more than 18 million metric tonnes of cheese are consumed worldwide every year.

* America is the world's largest producer. In 2004, the US made 4,327 metric tonnes of cheese a year - more than twice the amount of cheese produced by its nearest rival, Germany.

* In terms of export, however, France leads the way. It 2003, it shipped a massive $2.7m (£1.4m) worth of cheese.

* Greeks eat more cheese, per person, than any other nation - a whopping 27.3kg every year. Of this, around 20kg is feta.

* France's cheese consumption (24kg per person, per year) is also prolific, but the burden of being France's favourite cheese is shared between two big-hitters: emmenthal and camembert.

* Perhaps due to their fondness for pizza, mozzarella is the Americans' favourite cheese, accounting for more than a third of the country's cheese consumption. Between 1970 and 2003, the UStripled its appetite for cheese.

* Camel and cat milk are the source of some of the world's more unusual cheeses.

* There is more mozzarella produced in the UK than in Italy.

* It takes approximately 10 litres of milk to make 1kg of cheddar.

* There are 700 varieties of British cheese.

* The name Cornish yarg originated in a recipe found in a farmer's attic. The farmer's name was Gray: "yarg" spelt backwards.

* Shropshire blue is made in Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, but not Shropshire.

* Sales of wensleydale soared after the hit British film Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit was released last year. Tesco saw a rise of 23 per cent in sales of the English cheese.

* The idea for the Cheshire cat's wide grin in Alice in Wonderland came from a design on Cheshire cheese that had a smiling cat's face marked on one end.

* The smelliest cheese in France, according to scientists at Cranfield University with the help of a "smellometer", is the vieux boulogne.

* At her wedding, Queen Victoria was given a giant wheel of cheddar, weighing 1,000lb.

THE QUOTABLE CHEESEBOARD

* "How can you govern a country in which there are 246 types of cheese?"

Charles de Gaulle

* "A dinner that ends without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye."

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

* "Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese - toasted, mostly."

Robert Louis Stevenson

* "The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."

G K Chesterton

* "A poet's hope: to be,

like some valley cheese,

local, but prized elsewhere."

W H Auden