Talk:Wensleydale cheese

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I removed the following on the basis of WP:NPOV commercial bias. There may still be some facts to be gleaned from it so I have preserved it here. GameKeeper 21:50, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Wensleydale Dairy Products & Wensleydale Creamery

Wensleydale Dairy Products makes the only real Yorkshire Wensleydale Cheese in the world, at the Wensleydale Creamery.

Managing Director David Hartley said: “The Wensleydale Creamery has been at the heart of the Yorkshire dale’s economy for many years. Over the past 14 years the staff and management at the Creamery have created a thriving business based on the precious commodity of Real Yorkshire Wensleydale Cheese.

“The livelihoods of more than 190 Creamery workers and 36 farms in Wensleydale depend on the Creamery and we believe that Real Yorkshire Wensleydale Cheese contributes more than £8m to the local economy. By putting forward our submission for PDO status we are not just protecting the future prosperity of Wensleydale and elevating our product above those manufacturers outside the region.

“Wensleydale Cheese very much belongs to Yorkshire and we have been very encouraged by the support we have locally, regionally and nationally. Research has proven that consumers want greater emphasis to be placed on regional foods and also want to know that they are buying the genuine article.”

Made to a traditional recipe at the Wensleydale Creamery using real Wensleydale milk, the company’s hand-crafted and cloth-bound cheeses are available as traditional, blue, smoked and mature varieties which are also carefully blended with quality ingredients.

Alice Amsden, Production Director, said: “The wild flowers, herbs and grasses that grow in Wensleydale give the milk and hence the cheese its unique and special Wensleydale flavour. Much of the area is designated as one of environmental sensitivity where the use of artificial fertilisers and chemicals is restricted. All of our cheese is pure, wholesome and full of goodness.”

David Hartley adds: “For the Creamery it will mean that we can plan the future of our business with the security of knowing that producers from outside the region cannot pass off ersatz Wensleydale to consumers.

“It will mean that cheese producers outside the designated area of Wensleydale cannot produce a cheese and call it Real Yorkshire Wensleydale. This will help protect the regional heritage of the cheese which directly impacts on the livelihoods of Wensleydale farmers and families. It will help to ensure that consumers are getting the real product – which is a hand-crafted cheese, made from real Wensleydale milk with a unique taste. We intend to place significant emphasis on further informing our consumers as to the fact that Real Yorkshire Wensleydale is the only genuine article.”

Erastz

This page is nothing but a commercial puff for an organisation that produces an ersatz cheeese using the name of a well regarded regional product. By using "vegetarian" rennet all connection with the cheeses made down the years in Wensleydale has been abandoned. What is sold under the name "Wensleydale" by this organisation is a flavourles facsimile of a great tradition.--Damorbel (talk) 13:43, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Keith D, I have replaced my section. Wikipedia is not a publicity medium. What is being sold as Real Wensleydale is a poor quality substitute for the genuine article. There is nothing to stop that dairy making good quality cheese, why they want to sell it I can't imagine, it doesn't resemble Wensleydale at all. You are not allowed to sella fake Rolex, why should you be allowed to sell cheese made with vegetarian rennet and call it Wensleydale? You certainly can't sell cheese made with vegetarian rennet and call it Parmesan.--Damorbel (talk) 21:10, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

The section you have inserted does not abide by our policy of neutral point of view and is not referenced in any way so borders on original research. Keith D (talk) 22:38, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Keith D Nothing to do with neutral point of viewat all, This article is publicity for Real Wensleydale Cheese which is lining itself up for legal protection using ersatz ingredients. The by doing this the company doing this is marketing a fake product, there is nothing to stop them selling genuine Wensleydale cheese but they are trying to gain protection for a fake. As for original research, putting ersatz rennet in their cheese is in the publicity through and through.

It would be most intersting to know why they make this stuff, I suspect it has a longer shelf life, judging by the way supermarkets are pushing it.--Damorbel (talk) 07:10, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Seriously, the information you keep adding is in breach of wikipedia's policies.

Verifiability: You have provided no references at all, even after this has been pointed out to you repeatedly.

Neutral point of view: For example when you say that "use of pasteurised milk results in a product that is inferior in every way" you are asserting an opinion.

And until you provide good citations for the claims you keep adding, your contribution looks a lot like original research.

You have to understand that we're not saying you're wrong - we're just saying that your contribution needs to be properly backed up with references and reworded to appear more neutral in tone, then it will be perfectly acceptable in wikipedia. Perhaps it would be useful for you to add your proposed new paragraph to this talk page first then as you work on them then other editors can provide constructive advice to ensure it will be fitting when you add it to the main article? --VinceBowdren (talk) 11:40, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

you guys are both crazy, wensleydale is a rare and unique cheese that I love, but calling it vegetarian is absurd, as nearly all cheeses are vegetarian, and none are vegan, so that is a non-statement. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.219.235.232 (talk) 18:27, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

"Suitable for vegetarians"

This article promotes Real Wensleydale cheese, a product of a company called "the Wensleydale Creamery" in Hawes. This company makes cheese only with a substitute for animal rennet to make it "Suitable for vegetarians".

Best of luck to the Wensleydale Creamery in its efforts to sell this none traditional kind of cheese but it is misleading to call it "real" in the sense that it has a tradition behind it. Being made with a rennet substitute ensures that has nothing to do with the qualities that gave Wensleydale cheese it reputation.

Every effort is being made with lots of publicity to sell the products of this company, best of luck to them but it is an inferior product and it will eventually lose its reputation when people find a better. But as it stands it is misleading.

At this link About Us you will see that they claim a traditional recipe, but cheese was made in Wensleydale long before the attempts were made to find a substitute see here Rennet This link How its made explains about the addition of rennet at stge 3, without saying what rennet is used; however many of their cheeses are described as Catalogue suitable for vegetarians, in fact I enquired if they made any other kind and they said no.

This article is not about Wensleydale cheese, it is only a publicity puff for the Wensleydale Creamery in Hawes. Putting stuff like this in Wikipedia it is quite contrary to policy, it is a plain attempt to corrupt Wikipedia in the same way as the company is trying to profit using the name of a fine cheese --Damorbel (talk) 08:27, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Cheese Shop vs. Wallace and Gromit

I don't see why the article can't mention the Cheese Shop Sketch, where the proprieter is actually named Mr. Wensleydale, but does mention Walllace and Gromit, where the moon is supposed to be possibly made out of Wensleydale cheese.Mtsmallwood (talk) 20:43, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Did you read the content regarding Wallace and Gromit? That is no passing mention and there is documentary evidence that sales were significantly affected by the product being featured in the film. The cheese shop sketch is definitely just a passing mention and not worthy of feature in this article. --Simple Bob (talk) 21:28, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Apparently, the versions of Wrong Trousers released in various media markets substitute Wensleydale for other cheeses. French.wiki on "cheddar" says that "cheddar" is used in French release. And in U.S. release it is "Stilton". I don't have references, so I'm not adding this to the article. Vagabond nanoda (talk) 02:43, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Roquefort Connection? Error?

From day one of this article, this line has been in the history section:

"Wensleydale cheese was first made by French Cistercian monks from the Roquefort region, who had settled in Wensleydale. They built a monastery at Fors, but some years later the monks moved to Jervaulx in Lower Wensleydale."

Yet, the wiki article on Jervaulx Abbey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jervaulx_Abbey says that the monks who established the monastery at Fors were Cistercians from Savigny Abbey in France -- Savigny Abbey is in Normandy, Northern France. Roquefort is in southern France. Is the Roquefort connection just "marketing" or other "bumpf" which snuck in at the beginning and has been unquestioned since?

Randal Oulton (talk) 18:41, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

Latest revision.

I have made a small number of revisions to the article to reduce the intensity of the 'commercial publicity' content of the text. --Damorbel (talk) 07:17, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Creamery

(Moved here from user talk pages) Staszek Lem (talk) 17:25, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

I am sorry about your reversal of my contribution, would you care to explain why you did it? As the article stands it is merely publicity for a poor quality cheese, Wikipedia does not allow publicity for any product; it would be a shame to lose the entire article to this rule. --Damorbel (talk) 21:03, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

You din't explain what exactly part you are talking about, but I am guessing that it is about the piece which said "there is a major producer in Hawes of (mostly) vegetarian cheeses that claim to be traditional Wensleydale cheeses. There is no evidence ...". In wikipedia all statement must be referenced from reliable sources. The deleted piece has no references. Further, it does not say who is this "a major producer". BTW, "vegetarian cheese" sounds weird to me: cheese is made of milk, isn't it? I.e., it is an animal product. Further, you wrote "merely publicity for a poor quality cheese, Wikipedia does not allow publicity for any product" I am afraid you are confused here. Wikipedia articles contain information about everything regardless quality, as long as there is enough verifiable information. Wikipedia does have a rule which disallow advertising style of text: the article text must be written in neutral tone, from neutral point of view, as explained in its guidelines WP:NPOV, WP:PEACOCK Staszek Lem (talk) 00:19, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

BTW, you write "poor quiality cheese". Then how do you explain this? Staszek Lem (talk) 00:39, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

I am most interested in your response because I am in agreement wth a fair amount of it.

My family has long connections with Wensleydale, my father started a branch of his accountancy firm their in the early 1930s, he was helping the farmers with the newly introduced taxation.

Wikipedia is not a place for making publicity, doing that is against the rules. The Wensleydale cheese page contains little but publicity for the Wensleydale Creamary, a commercial dairy claiming to be the inheritors of a great tradition when all their cheeses; I have been there, bought their cheese and asked them; are made using vegetable 'rennet' to promote te souring of the milk. There are many compounds that sour milk but only calf's rennet has been used in the past to produce cheese. The mere fact that a compound ferments (coagulates) milk without making it un safe to eat in no way makes the stuff taste like cheese, let alone give it the flavour of calf's based rennet. 'Vegetarian' rennets manage to reproduce the texture of traditional rennets (none would be sold if it didn't) but at best vegetarian cheese is flavourless, as I discovered at the Wensleydale Creamery for myself, or it is acid and indegestable.

Vegetarian cheeses are inevitably of low quality, it is illegal to sell cheeses such as Parmesan if they are not made with calf's rennet. In fact I know of no cheese on the Continent that is made with vegetarian rennet, although some are almost flavourless (name a good cheese from Germany or Austria!).

The English used to produce fabulous cheese but during WWII the government took over milk processing to help stop the population starving. It worked, but like all good civil servants, having taken possession, price was all and they have no truck with qualityb and variety. Cheese production was run by a government department until the 1990s, under the name Milk Marketing Board, the only difference being that the MMB no longer had a monopoly but beiing bigger than any other it dominated the market. As far as I can see The Wensleydale Creamery is a management buyout trying to pretend it is a 'traditional' cheese maker by using the traditional method of propoganda. The test for the quality of cheese is the taste, something not found in the products of the Wensleydale Creamery.

The article is pure propoganda for the Wensleydale Creamery, it even lists their product range, titles such as Real Yorkshire Wensleydale, Mature Wensleydale and Oak Smoked Wensleydale is cold smoked to produce a cheese with a special tang and texture are all lifted straight from the product list of the Wensleydale Creamery's promotional literature.

I intend to 'undo' your reversal. Next time please notify me before taking such action.

PS Your Yorkshire Post link is surely just another example of the propoganda machine in action, the 'Real' test of cheese is in the eating! --Damorbel (talk) 07:29, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

• Sorry, colleague, whatever yoiu say may be right, but in order to put criticism into an article you have to supply it with references.
• Also, you would not want to undo my edits, because I removed much of promotional phrasing. You may further remove texts like "special tang and texture".
• If you don't like that ther article pays much attention to Wensleydale Creamery, please add information about any other creamery which produces Wensleydale cheese.
• Whether you like this cheese or not, it is a known product. You asked in my talk page "do you have any experience of Wensleydale Cheese", and my answer is "yes I did". I am a software engineer and I happen to use Python language, and this is how I learned about Wensleydale cheese. I know nothing else about it and I don't care. My (and yours) personal experience has nothing to do with writing wikipedia article about cheese. I would suggest you to spend some time on reading and digesting wikipedia policies, such as "verifiability", WP:CITE, "no original research".
• And again, you are welcome to edit any text which is in promotional language, but you cannot remove facts verifiable from references, and you cannot add opitions not supproted by references. Staszek Lem (talk) 17:25, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
• Re "PS": Just as wikipedia is not for promotion, likewise it is not for crusades against "propaganda machines". If the cheese is as bad as you are saying, then surely someone else complained about this in media. If you cannot provide any referenes to such complaints, then sorry colleague, your personal taste in cheese is not a valid source of information for wikipedia. Staszek Lem (talk) 17:31, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Place made vs. type

I think that we should consider saying it's type of cheese at the begining. It's not any cheese that just happens to be made in Wensleydale. You could make some chedder in Wensleydale and it wouldn't be Wensleydale, it be chedder.

I know there's this regional 'where it comes from' thing, which apparently the French are very keen on. However, I don't think it's critical for English cheeses. Dannman (talk) 10:48, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

Agreed. The article is appallingly skewed - the vast majority of Wensleydale cheese sold in UK shops is industrial slab cheese made in creameries operated by big dairy companies like Dairy Crest, and it certainly isn't made in Wensleydale. I'm going to rephrase the lead to reflect this but the article really needs a complete rewrite. --Ef80 (talk) 19:17, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Wensleydale cheese/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

. Requires addition of inline references using one of the {{Cite}} templates Switch existing inline link to reference Requires copy-edit for WP:MOS Keith D 13:58, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Substituted at 18:44, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

Why Wensleydale Creamery

Why is there mention of Wensleydale Creamery at all, let alone A Section (?). What relevance, other than they happen to make cheese, is any of the information. Is it actually notable in some way? I'd like to delete it.

Dannman (talk) 11:08, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

It's the only significant producer of Wensleydale cheese actually located in Wensleydale, so it probably deserves a mention, but the current section is overly promotional and excessively long. It also implies that Wensleydale cheese can't be made anywhere else, which is nonsense. --Ef80 (talk) 19:03, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

Split proposed

This section focuses entirely on a single creamery based on the type of Wensleydale it produces which would be more acceptable if the article was only about Yorkshire Wensleydale, but as it covers the cheese in general its inclusion here appears to give it undue prominence. It also produces numerous cheeses in addition to Wensleydale, information about which would be valuable in a separate article but is not relevant here. Rather than deleting much of the section I suggest that it be split off into a new creamery article and that the cheese article retain only the information on the PGI status as part of the history. EdwardUK (talk) 15:00, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

Support - I don't think this section is bad here, but a separate article might make more sense. Jonpatterns (talk) 17:32, 9 July 2020 (UTC)