Yoredale

Yoredale is a delicately milky and buttery Wensleydale cheese with a clean fresh and slightly lemony taste. This is a traditional raw milk clothbound farmhouse Wensleydale produced in small batches to a slow traditional handmade recipe, the cheeses are aged for 3 – 4 months. This results in a cheese that is smooth and creamy in texture, with great earthy flavours coming from the pastures.

Yoredale is a delicate milky and buttery Wensleydale cheese that has all the lemon and acidity you would expect from a traditional Wensleydale cheese  with mineral, earthy tones closer to the rind. Unlike the more mass produced crumbly Wensleydale, Curlew Dairy, based in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales uses a traditional slow recipe which gives the cheese a much softer, creamier texture. It has an open texture and melts exceedingly well on cheese on toast.

Ben Spence and his wife Sam started cheese-making at Home Farm in 2019 – the first farm-produced Wensleydale since 1957. In 2021, Ben and Sam moved to their own micro-dairy ‘Curlew Dairy’ where their delicious cheese is now made.

Over the past 12 months, Ben and Sam from Curlew Dairy have been working on their cheese, continuing to develop and experiment with the recipe. The cheese is now exclusively made with vegetarian rennet, and is simply bound in cloth, rather than being buttered, alongside a focus on the use of more traditional starter cultures. To reflect these changes they felt it only right to change the name of the cheese from Old Roan, to Yoredale, being the original name for the valley of Wensleydale, a fitting tribute to their traditionally made Wensleydale cheese.

Ben and Sam use unpasteurised milk, so the cheese truly reflects the ‘terroir’ of the farm. The final flavour is determined by everything from the pastures on which the cows grazed, to the weather, the season, and even the bacteria in the soil. The cheese is clothbound and aged for 3-4 months to achieve its perfect taste and quality.