A life-long passion for making fine cheese

Over a century ago Gabrielle Kervella's grandmother was riding over the Tākaka hill on a Harley Davidson when it was just a gravel track.

Now, award-winning cheese maker Kervella is settled back in her birth place of Golden Bay where she continues to make the cheeses that have been a life-long passion.

It has been a fascinating and peripatetic life.

Related Stories:

She grew up across four continents as the daughter of a British Army colonel, later travelling widely alongside her French husband who worked on the oil fields.

Eventually she settled in Western Australia, bought land, and embarked on a cheese making career.

Kervella, now in her 80s, fell in love with cheese making on annual visits to South West France to visit her husband’s parents, she told RNZ’s Nine to Noon.

“After we married, we bought a beautiful car in Italy, an Alfa Romeo, and we toured France and met his parents in the south-west of France, in Bayonne and there began my delight in French food, of being allowed to shop with my mother in law, and the wonderful bargaining and vibrancy of the markets, and, of course, the cheese as well, which is where I started my passion for food and absolute delight in in the cheese.”

Her vision to raise a herd of goats and make cheese in dry, hot, Western Australia was met with scepticism at first, she said.

“The Agricultural Department told me that bit of dry land in Western Australia, wasn't going to work, but I believed, in France, they have these wonderful extended families on small acreage.

“So, I just became determined that I would find a means of staying on that land. And it came in part from my experience in Bayonne and the love of the cheese.”

The market for artisanal cheese was in its infancy in the 1980s - and she was determined to farm organically, also a rarity at the time.

However, every year she returned to France to hone her skills.

“I found a wonderful place to study on each holiday, I just went as what we call a woofer these days, free labour, and they were incredibly generous to me. Obviously, I wasn't going to be opposition to them.

“And they taught me everything they knew.”

Back in Australia, however, raising goats and making cheese was proving difficult, she said.

“None of their teachings applied, because the weather was different, the goats were different, and when I finally did manage to get some fairly decent cheese, the Australians didn't want to eat it.”

But she persevered until a visiting food writer from Sydney came upon her cheese and took some back to the east coast.

"And from then on, Sydney became my biggest outlet, we were back roading across the Nullarbor, so that helped with the cost of trade.”

Her style of cheese took off, she said.

“We were the only biodynamic, which I call the pinnacle of organic farming, farm in the southern hemisphere, and I won the overall award two years in succession.”

After successfully running Kervella Cheese for the next 20 years, New Zealand beckoned, she said.

“We came over to Golden Bay, and I just had this feeling that I had to come and live here.

“It was the funniest thing. When I returned to Australia, everything just flowed. The business sold for the price that I asked, the farm sold for much more than I paid for it.

“Everything just flowed. We are both so happy here in Golden Bay in New Zealand.”

The icing on the cake was that raw milk cheese is allowed in New Zealand.

“We discovered that we could make raw cheese, and we were surrounded by a dairy with sustainably raised, beautiful milk.”

Gabrielle Kervella’s memoir is Never tell Me I Can’t.