Congratulations to Glengarry Fine Cheese for winning Best of Show with Celtic Blue Reserve at the biggest cheese competition in the United States!
A soft blue enriched with extra buttercream and aged four months, the cheese won top honours at the annual American Cheese Society Judging & Competition, held this week in Providence, Rhode Island. Some 1,700 cheeses were submitted for judging by cheese producers in North, Central and South America.
Two years ago, Glengarry’s Lankaster Aged was named Best Cheese in the World at an international competition in England.
Margaret Peters-Morris, owner at Glengarry Fine Cheese, located in Lancaster near Cornwall, Ontario, give full credit to cheesemaker Wilma Klein-Swormink: “This cements 20 years of really hard work from myself and my staff. Through a lot of sweat and tears, we were determined to reach a real pinnacle in our career.”
Klein-Swormink has played a key role in cheesemaking at Glengarry since its inception in 2008 and produces cheese with the dedicated team at Glengarry as plant manager/cheesemaker.
Glengarry Fine Cheese and Glengarry Cheesemaking are located on the Peters family farm which has been in the family since 1967, Peters-Morris explains. “Our ancestral roots hail from the Netherlands and our parents have laid the framework for the family farm to grow and prosper in Lancaster where our parents started their dairy and crop farm which is now in the hands of the next generation who are continuing the dairy tradition and, now, the cheese factory is building its own tradition and reputation with the hard work and dedication that our parents instilled in myself and my brother.”
Margaret shares cheesemaking responsibilities with Wilma who is also the daughter of Dutch immigrants who also came to Eastern Ontario to establish a dairy farm.
A single herd of Brown Swiss cows provides the milk for Celtic Blue.
In addition to being named Best of Show, Celtic Blue Reserve won the blue-cheese category. Canadian cheesemakers won five other categories in the prestigious competition:
- Bella Casara Buffalo Mozzarella, Quality Cheese, Vaughan, Ontario
- Celebrity International Original Goat Cheese, Mariposa Dairy, Lindsay, Ontario
- Louis Cyr Strong Gouda, Fromagerie Bergeron, Saint-Antoine-de-Tilly , Quebec
- Smoked Caciocavallo, Saputo Dairy Products, Saint-Laurent, Quebec
- Champfleury, Agropur Fine Cheese, Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec.
Margaret Peters-Morris started making cheese commercially under the Glengarry Fine Cheese banner seven years ago, but her involvement in cheesemaking across North America goes back two decades. She’s making a name now as an award-winning cheesemaker in her own right but for many years, Margaret was—and still is—the go-to-source for lactic starters and ripening cultures for cheesemakers from California to Quebec.
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- Munchies: America, your favorite cheese is Canadian
- Cheese Planet: Rosy future for this Blue
- Margaret Peters-Morris: Helping to make cheese across North America for two decades
