Choosing the world’s best cheese — right here in Madison

Cheese championships are hardly a spectator sport, but cheese-lovers will have a unique opportunity to observe the 2006 World Championship Cheese Contest right here in Madison. Free and open to the public, the contest is slated to take place at the Monona Terrace Convention Center on March 21-23.

While UW–Madison scientists don’t usually compete, they do influence the contest’s outcome. This year, for instance, Mark Johnson, a scientist at UW–Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research will join an international panel of judges that will include cheese connoisseurs from France, Japan, the Netherlands and South Africa. Another judge on the 15-member panel will be a Puerto Rican, Leyda Ponce de Leon, who earned a doctoral degree in food science at UW–Madison in 1999.

More than 60 percent of the winners from last year’s United States Championship Cheese contest were graduates of a UW–Madison dairy manufacturing mini-course, says William Wendorff, chair of the department of food science.

The Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association (WCMA) created the first World Championship in 1957. Since then, the world contest has been held on even years and the national championship on odd years.

In 2006, contest organizers expect more than 1,500 entries from more than 20 nations to fill 51 classes of cheese. Six years ago, by contrast, judges evaluated 1,000 cheeses that were sorted into only 28 classes. A growing trend in recent years has been the emergence of “specialty” cheeses such as asiago, provolone and gorgonzola.

Each cheese starts with a perfect score of 100 and then loses points as judges evaluate flavor, texture, body, and appearance in each class. But in the final round of judging, on Thursday, March 23 at 1 p.m., officials inspect the cheeses that scored the highest in their class. This time, instead of deducting points, judges are instructed to evaluate each cheese on its own merit. After all the scores are averaged and ranked in order, a World Champion Cheese is announced.

For more information about the contest, visit the Web site of the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association.