I had intended to make this week's post about flooding and the issues of one in fifty events - I'll come back to that next week I think! The reason being that I was reminded of the importance of lifelong learning today by my cheese merchant!
Once a week I go to the biggest local market around for the basics to see us through the week - vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, yoghurts, and most importantly, cheese. I am not a fan of supermarket cheese - as I was reminded at the beginning of the month when Jean-Marc went on holiday, and I had to buy prepackaged supermarket cheeses. Even well treated and at the expensive end of the market, they just weren't up to scratch.
Jean-Marc is brilliant (he won't mind me saying so either!). If a cheese that I normally buy isn't quite to my taste, he will advise against buying it or even refuse to sell it to me. Last week I needed a balanced cheese board for a dinner party I was doing for my mother and her friends, and he came up with a brilliant mix and just the right quantities so that there wasn't a huge amount left over.
I once took him a piece of well kept Stinking Bishop as a present, and didn't tell him what it was. It was like watching a real wine expert - he looked at the cheese from all angles, smelt it, felt the texture, all the time giving a running commentary on his thoughts - cow's milk, washed in alcohol, fruit alcohol, probably pear. He was highly impressed with the flavour too, when he eventually got round to tasting it - and was horrified but impressed to hear it was an English cheese as it was so well made and well done.
Today we were talking cheese - he said that he was one of the panel of expert tasters used to give out the awards for Pont l'Eveque cheeses, doing blind tastings just as the wine chaps do. He said he felt that you couldn't be a cheese expert if you hadn't trained hard for at least 10 to 15 years, understanding things like the effect of forage on milk quality, the different ways of refining cheeses, the influence of soil and weather on a producer.
The reason he should be an advertisement for lifelong learning strategies? With all his skills and knowledge thus far, he said he still had even more to learn and was learning every day. If he wasn't learning, he would be dead. Bravo Jean-Marc! Those are my sentiments entirely.
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