Over Christmas, Chris and I finally tried our 19 year aged cheddar that my parents got us in late November when we visited Wisconsin. We waited so long because we had been on a diet over Advent. Being on a diet over Advent might sound really awful to a lot of people, but it actually really made our Christmas period much, much nicer. We hadn’t taken any proper time off in ages and as we have just bought a huge pool, we didn’t exactly want to go anywhere, so we took off and fully celebrated the traditional twelve days of Christmas. It meant that rather than having a December full of mulled wine and cookies, we were really good until sundown on Christmas Eve and were actually up for enjoying a full Christmas period up to the fifth of January because we hadn’t started early. I really recommend this if you want a different Christmas experience. I can see why in the Middle Ages, they treated Advent like a “little Lent” (that is, half the length, but observed in a similar manner) and then Christmastide as the festive period. You could hardly have the 12 days after going strong from the start of the December, or even from Thanksgiving, which is way too easy to do in the US. At any rate, we had a really great, long Christmas:
All this meant we were finally ready to try the most expensive cheese either of us have ever owned by a fair amount. It was very interesting and probably best seen rather than read about, so here is the video:
The two really great cheeses in the video, the 5 year and the 19 year, both come from Pasture Pride in Cashton, WI. I cannot recommend their sharp cheddar enough. Nobody does cheese like Wisconsin and this is the best of Wisconsin cheese.