Cheese Club - Obey!!

So Cheese Club has returned for the year, and despite having rested well over the southern Summer is struggling to get any momentum going and get back into the groove. This Cheese Club was a modest, lightweight affair, well suited to watching a cricket match on the telly or smoking a few bongs with some old friends while watching Thunderbirds (or so I imagine).

You know what this is

This Cheese Club started with a trip to the comfort of the Lactic Vault; warm, moist and dimly lit, like returning to the womb, or at least a nightclub in Darwin. And although not as comforting as the womb, there was a greater choice of company and the wine list was longer.

And so to the cheese:

• Graindorge Calvados Camembert - If I had a dollar for every Cheese Club that started with a French white-moulder, I'd almost be able to buy lunch. Not with a glass of wine perhaps, but certainly a Saigon pork and salad roll. This is a small and fairly stock-standard Camembert with a good depth of flavour - as always the French ones are more salty and intense than the locals - with the bonus of some added interesting brassica smells. They're apparently washed in Calvados, which is something I'm proudly francophilic about, but I can't say it left much of an impression. Nice enough.

• Kefalograviera - This stretched curd, sheep's milk cheese from Greece is a favourite for saganaki, a favourite starter for Melbourne's Greek restaurants whether good or bad. Eaten uncooked and warmed to room temperature it had a strong, thin and unpleasant grip on my tastebuds that was, well, bad. In a word, "don't". I'll have a go at saganaki with it and report back.

Tomme de Chevre

• Tomme de Chevre - Some firm, goaty joy from the Poitou-Charentes region of France. Tart, firm and with an intensity and depth of flavour that was like a wake-up call from an angry ungulate. Intense and pointed, with a narrow nuttiness and a lemon-tart, almost caramel rich finish; this was the highlight, at least as far as complexity theory goes.

• Roccolo - a semi-hard cow's milk cheese from Lombardy. Despite its bovine origins, it has the acid, citrus hints of a firmer, older goat cheese. Its texture was firm and crumbly in the middle, moving to a softer ripened edge, while an earthy, damp, soft richness was balanced with a local tang. Not earth shattering, but definitely something to make a glass of sangiovese modestly fantastic.

• Nashua - Oooooh, this is a bit of alright. A bit more than a bit, perhaps. A cute, perky washed rind cheese from New South Wales the size of a small Camembert with the orange tint that tells of its stinky race. Not too orange - the colour of a Neighbours starlet whose publicist knows when to say "enough" to the tanning spray. Unlike a Neighbours starlet, however, this is a meaty and lusciously fat cheese, with enough orange mould to let you know who's boss, but not enough to scare the children. A small step up from a beginner washed-rinder, but not a cheese that could be readily weaponized.

Gippsland Blue - a playful trifle, but that's all.

• Gippsland Blue - A soft, buttery and very mild blue that would have been a good end to Dr Johnson's famous dinner that was "...a good dinner enough, to be sure; but it was not a dinner to ask a man to." Mild. Soft. Buttery. A dessert cheese perhaps, but not a soul-wrenching, life-changing alternative cheese from a neighboring yet threatening universe. More a familiar uncle with a cream cardigan, leather patches and a packet of Craven A. A polite blue cheese, which frankly, is too much of a contradiction in terms for me.