fine food news
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With his staff handling day-to-day cheese-making, Martell has more time for interests like his National Collection of Perry Pears
Fruit of his labours
Interview
Cheese-maker turned distiller Charles Martell shows MICK WHITWORTH around his idyllic Gloucestershire base, the product of four decades of hard graft Gloucester and the nettle-coated, soft, cows’ milk May Hill Green. “The staff decide what to do and when,” he says. “They’re much more intelligent than me, anyway.” Which is patently untrue. Born into a branch of the old Timothy White’s pharmacy family, but missing out on most of its wealth, Martell has grafted for everything he has today, driven by his love of all things natural and traditional. He claims never to have been a campaigner – “I’d be too scared to wave a placard” – yet he has spent a lifetime fighting the good fight for old-fashioned foods. A zoology graduate and lifelong nature buff, he worked at Sir
Aardman Animations 2005
trolling through Charles Martell’s perry pear orchard on a balmy, late summer afternoon, it’s impossible not to get a bit green-eyed. The maker of Stinking Bishop cheese, and now distiller of boutique spirits too, has lived at Hunts Court Farm, Dymock, in rural Gloucestershire for more than four decades, turning a derelict property into a picture of Country Living perfection. The 70-acre spread provides a snapshot of everything that makes Martell tick. The orchard nearest his house, for example, hosts part of the National Perry Pear Collection, which he began curating nearly 25 years ago. He also keeps the National Collection of Gloucester Plums here, and 106 varieties of Gloucester apple. Fenced off in a paddock are a bevvy of traditional-breed beasts and birds, including several of the rare Gloucester cattle he helped rescue from extinction. A barn near his farmhouse houses production of his seven artisan cheeses. The most famous, Stinking Bishop, was last month named Best Export Cheese at the British Cheese Awards. Its close relative, Starvall Royal, made exclusively for the Prince of Wales, earned Martell his Royal Warrant. Behind the cheese barn, a 17th century building contains Martell’s latest venture: a micro-distillery, producing premium spirits from apples, pears, cider and perry. It’s believed this building operated as a distillery more than 200 years ago, making it Britain’s oldest working still-house. And adjoining the orchard is a small but immaculate parterre, where, as we talk, Martell’s Ukrainian-born second wife Sasha is cutting globe artichoke flowers to dry for winter decorations, watched by their young daughter. (Martell, previously widowed, has two grown-up children from his first marriage). “The whole point of this place is to give us a living,” he tells me. “We don’t have a speedboat in the Mediterranean but we do live well, and the kid has new shoes when she needs them.” A lean, tanned 67-year-old, Martell has “no worries” beyond a vague anxiety about the future of the high street, where his sales are concentrated. “I’m in the lucky position that I don’t need to look for more business,” he says. “People come to us.” He hasn’t exactly retired, but he lets his staff of 10 full- and part-timers, led by former Dairy Crest operations manager Richard Dunnett, take the strain. They produce a tonne of cheese a week, including Double and Single
Wallace & Gromit gave Martell and Stinking Bishop 15 minutes of global fame in 2005
Peter Scott’s Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge before buying the dilapidated High Court Farm, with 10 acres of land, in 1972 for £18,000. While he and his first wife ran the property as a smallholding, Martell drove livestock trucks to “keep the family afloat”, and in
doing so came across the rare Gloucester cow. “There were only 68 left in the world when I came here,” he recalls. “I thought we should start making cheese to try to publicise their plight.” He wasn’t much of a cheesemaker back then, but turned out to be a surprisingly good retailer. Made redundant from his driving job in 1977 he began selling other farmhouse cheeses from a market stall – blue Wensleydale, Cheshire, all “in the rind” – making enough cash to give his first brood a good private education. “We had a queue at the stall from day one,” he says. “People were fascinated because you couldn’t get real cheese in those days. If you went into a Fine Fare supermarket there was five metres of cheddar, a bit of Edam, some Danish blue, and at Christmas you had Stilton. And that was it. That was cheese.” He sold the stall in 1987, bought more land, more cows, and set up a pukka dairy making Double and Single Gloucester. In fact, he brought back Single Gloucester from oblivion – there were no other makers left when he began – and went on to win EU Protected Designation of Origin status for Single Gloucester. Today there are seven producers, and around 700 female Gloucester cattle. Stinking Bishop was an early Martell creation, a powerfully pungent, perry-washed product loosely modeled on Reblochon. In 2005 it gave him his 15 minutes of
global fame when it made a comical appearance in Aardman Animation’s ‘Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit’. The world’s media were intrigued by the story of this tiny English cheese-maker facing a sudden doubling of demand for his unlikely movie-star cheese. Stinking Bishop was never meant to be popular with “Mrs Half A Pound Of Mature Cheddar”, Martell says, and in naming it (after a variety of perry pear) he wanted “to make it abundantly clear that it was smelly”. “Some people love their smelly cheese,” he points out. He is similarly clear about the niche for his spirits, which retail at around £45 for 70cl. Martell isn’t trying to compete on price with multinationals like Diageo, or with the new, smaller ‘distillers’ who buy in cheap neutral spirit as a base and add flavours, rather than distilling their own base spirit from scratch (see FFD May 2013). “All I’m saying is, when you buy gin, ask where the base spirit came from.” Of his own products, he says: “The average punter might not appreciate it, but it’s like the cheese – we don’t want the average punter. We want people who’re interested in provenance and taste.” Ironically, the creator of Stinking Bishop says the subtler pear and apple notes of his new spirits pass him by. “I’ve not got much sense of taste or smell these days, even for the most disgustingly smelly of my cheeses,” he tells me. “It’s just old age.” www.charlesmartell.co.uk
Vol.14 Issue 9 · October 2013
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