Convinced that specialty cheese is where wine was, say, 30 years ago, we launched a magazine a few years ago titled, CHEESE CONNOISSEUR. It is an unusual hybrid magazine, read religiously by the specialty cheese trade, it is also a consumer lifestyle publication sold in every Barnes & Noble, all Hudson News airport and commuter terminal shops and fine food stores everywhere.
It is a fun magazine… everything about cheese, of course, but also lots of accoutrements, often featuring pairings with fresh produce items and also great craft beers, fine wines, Ports and other libations. It also includes great eco-tourism pieces and heart-rending stories of cheesemakers trying to do good around the world.
The Summer 2013 issue is out and contains some great stuff. The issue is chock full of recipes on how to do incredible variations with cheese perfect for summer entertaining, such as Caprese salad. Pundit pal Tommy Leighton, former editor of the Fresh Produce Journal in the UK, wrote The Ultimate 1-Day Cheese Tour of London, and we did a really enlightening cover story with William Shatner of, depending on your generation, Star Trek, T.J Hooker, Boston Legal or Priceline fame! We called it William Shatner and the Fromage Frontier.
Whole Foods Market was kind enough to provide some great cheese for the shoot, and the company also lent us Certified Cheese Professional Bryan Bergmann, who taught Shatner how to cut a giant wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Turns out, Shatner is a knowledgeable and focused foodie with great intellectual interest in how taste develops and how we can get children to enjoy things such as bitter vegetables. This was a topic we studied in-depth at the 2012 “Ideation Fresh” Foodservice Forum as reflected in this interview with Gabriella Morini.
You can check out Shatner’s Brown Bag Wine Tasting segment on his website here. He is all about opening the possibilities of taste for people and not wanting them to be intimidated by expert opinion. We sort of try and encourage that kind of experimentation with specialty cheese in CHEESE CONNOISSEUR, so we found ourselves in sync.
We believe in hard work but it is great when work is a treat, and it was certainly a hoot when we rented a glamorous Beverly Hills mansion and the Pundit got to hang out with Bill for a day.
Here is a snippet of the video we took during the shoot:
If you would like to get a subscription to the magazine, you can sign up here.
It is also available in electronic versions on Apple’s iTunes store, at Amazon Appstore for Android and on the Blackberry Newsstand.
If you are a retailer interested in selling CHEESE CONNOISSEUR at your store, please let us know here.
