Graceburn is a marinated, crumbly cow's-milk cheese made at Bore Place in Kent, England, styled after the Australian "Persian feta" tradition. It's sold in glass jars, broken into small curd pieces and steeped in oil with garlic, thyme, bay, and black pepper.
The company behind it, Blackwoods Cheese Company, was started by homesick Australian cheesemongers working in London who couldn't find anything in Britain that tasted like the marinated feta they'd grown up with.
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An Australian Cheese Detour That Never Ended
Dave Holton grew up near Melbourne's Yarra Valley and started his cheese career almost by accident. "I did a degree in environmental earth science, but soon realised that it wasn't the field for me," he told Borough Market.
"One of my mates was a cheesemaker at the local dairy, and I mentioned at a party that I was looking to work in food. It turned out that the dairy had a job going."
"I started three days later." That was 2006, at Yarra Valley Dairy.
Holton and childhood friend Cameron Rowan later planned a European cheese tour before starting their own venture back in Australia. Holton had lined up ten days of work in London first: "my first experience of European cheese was working behind the counter at Neal's Yard Dairy in Borough Market during the Christmas rush, which I can only define as bedlam."
Those ten days turned into roughly three years at Neal's Yard Dairy, plus an internship with the Mons affineurs in France.
Blackwoods Was Founded by Four Friends, Not Two
Blackwoods Cheese Company is usually credited to just Dave Holton and Tim Jarvis, but it started as a group of four Neal's Yard Dairy alumni: Holton, Jarvis, Cameron Rowan, and another childhood friend, Rory Holwerda.
Borough Market called Jarvis "the lone Brit" of the founding group.
"We named the company after the road I grew up on," Holton said. Rowan eventually moved back to Australia and Holwerda relocated to Scotland.
Both kept a share in the business.
Holton, who married an Englishwoman and settled permanently in Kent, and Jarvis became the company's full-time cheesemakers.
UK company records list only Holton and Holwerda as formal directors, so Jarvis's exact ownership status isn't publicly documented, though he's consistently named in press coverage as Holton's working partner.
The team started making cheese in 2013 out of an industrial unit in Brockley, southeast London, driving 500 litres of milk in from Kent by van a couple of times a week. That commute eventually pushed the move to Bore Place, a working farm near Chiddingstone, Kent, where Blackwoods now makes cheese from a 240-cow herd crossed from Holstein Friesian, Montbéliarde, and Swedish Red genetics, chosen to raise the milk's butterfat and protein.
Why It Isn't Called "Persian Feta" or "Feta"
Holton named the cheese after the Graceburn, a river running through the town where he and Rowan grew up, not after a person.
The choice of name wasn't just sentimental: "feta" is a legally protected term in the EU and UK, reserved for brined sheep's and goat's milk cheese made in specific regions of Greece, so a cow's-milk cheese made in Kent couldn't use the word commercially at all.
Holton has said the recipe traces to "an Australian cheesemaker who had travelled through Iran in the 1970s and fallen in love with the local feta-style cheeses," a version of Persian feta's origin story most closely associated with Meredith Dairy in Victoria. Meredith's founders, Sandy and Julie Cameron, say they saw the oil-jar method firsthand on a 1972 overland trip through an Iranian desert village.
A separate, earlier-dated commercial version credits Yarra Valley Dairy cheesemaker Richard Thomas with developing "Persian Fetta" in 1995.
Both stories may be true at once: Thomas may have been first to sell it commercially, while the Camerons' encounter predates that by over twenty years without being turned into a product until later.
Persian feta itself is a distinctly Australian invention rather than an Iranian cheese export. It swaps Greek feta's firm, brined block for a softer, creamier curd steeped in flavored oil instead of straight brine, which is why the flavor reads milder and more herbal than a typical block feta.
How Graceburn Is Made
Warm milk goes almost straight from the milking parlour into the cheese vat with no real cooling step, and starter culture is added while it's still warm. The curds are pressed, then brined, then broken by hand into small, irregular pieces rather than kept in the large blocks used for traditional feta.
The Fine Cheese Co. specifically calls out that hand-breaking step as a deliberate departure from standard feta technique.
Those pieces go into glass jars covered in a blend of cold-pressed rapeseed oil and extra virgin olive oil, infused with garlic, thyme, bay, and black pepper, and mature roughly a week before they're ready to sell. Two independent cheesemongers, Mons Cheesemongers and La Fromagerie, both trace the rapeseed oil to Duchess Farms in Hertfordshire, which runs against the company's own marketing language describing it as "local" to Kent.
Raw or Pasteurized? A Genuine Discrepancy
Blackwoods brands itself "Real And Raw," and most retailers and press coverage describe Graceburn as made from raw, unpasteurized milk, framing it as a cheese the founders couldn't legally make back home since raw-milk cheesemaking is banned in Australia. But at least two UK retailers, The Fine Cheese Co. and George & Joseph, list the product as pasteurized on their own site.
No source resolves this cleanly. It's possible Blackwoods runs a separate pasteurized batch for some retail channels, since raw-milk products face tighter distribution rules, or that some retailers are simply using an incorrect stock icon.
Buyers who need certainty about raw versus pasteurized should check with the specific retailer before purchase rather than assume either way.
Awards
Graceburn has picked up a string of UK cheese awards since 2019, including Best Flavour Added Cheese at the 2019 British Cheese Awards, Best Cow's Milk Cheese at the 2019 Artisan Cheese Awards, Great Taste stars in 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2026, and a Bronze at the 2024 British Cheese Awards. Blackwoods' own consolidated awards list doesn't show a World Cheese Awards result for Graceburn itself.
The World Cheese Awards medals in the company's history (a 2022 Gold and Silver) belong to its washed-rind cheese, Edmund Tew, not Graceburn.
How to Serve Graceburn
Charlie Hibbert, head chef at Thyme in Gloucestershire, keeps a jar in his kitchen year-round and stirs it through a tagliatelle with cavolo nero pesto and toasted walnuts: "Graceburn is a British 'feta-style' cheese, kept in oil as opposed to brine, and spiked with peppercorns, bay, thyme and more. It's a staple in my kitchen and I always take a jar off the shelves whenever I see it."
Paxton & Whitfield publishes a simpler avocado toast version, crumbled over mashed avocado with plum-and-habanero jam and flaxseeds, and Neal's Yard Dairy has shared a baked Graceburn and stewed peppers recipe from food writer Patrick McGuigan. Beyond specific recipes, it's most often used crumbled into salads, over toast, or stirred into warm pasta at the end of cooking so the curd softens without fully melting.
Spoon some of the jar oil over whatever the cheese goes on. It carries the garlic, thyme, bay, and pepper, and pouring it down the sink leaves half of what you paid for in the jar.
What to Use Instead When Graceburn Isn't Available
A jar of Meredith Dairy's marinated feta is the closest match in style and origin, since both trace back to the same Australian Persian-feta tradition. A crumbled Greek feta tossed with olive oil, garlic, and herbs approximates the flavor without the specific oil-jar preservation method.
The oil is half the product, so a home version needs its own. Warm oil gently with garlic, thyme, bay, and cracked pepper, let it cool completely, then pour it over the crumbled cheese and leave it overnight before serving.
Skip a hard, dry block feta for this. Graceburn's curd crushes against a piece of toast under the back of a fork, and a firm brined block stays in cubes however long it sits in oil.
Buying Graceburn
Graceburn is sold almost entirely through UK specialty retailers rather than mainstream supermarkets, typically in 250g jars.
Read the oil before you look at the cheese. Oil that has gone cloudy means the marinade has started to break down, and the herbs in a good jar are still visible as whole pieces rather than sediment on the bottom.
A 250g jar goes further than it looks, because the curd comes broken small and two spoonfuls dress a whole bowl of pasta. Flavored versions sit on the shelf beside the plain one, and the plain jar is the better first buy since its herbed oil is already doing the seasoning.
Nutrition and Safety
The Fine Cheese Co. publishes a nutrition panel of 645 kcal, 47.3g fat, 4.1g carbohydrate, and 20g protein per 100g, which adds up consistently. A second retailer, La Fromagerie, lists the same 645 kcal but with only 21.8g fat and 14.6g protein, figures that don't add up to the same calorie total, so treat the Fine Cheese Co. numbers as the more reliable reference.
Because sourcing describes Graceburn as raw milk from most retailers but pasteurized from at least two others, pregnant women and others who need to avoid unpasteurized dairy should confirm with the specific retailer before eating it.
Storing Graceburn
The oil is doing the preserving, so anything sitting above the oil line spoils first. Push the curd back under with a clean spoon every time you take some out.
The Fine Cheese Co. recommends eating it within seven days of receipt, or five days once opened. Keep the curd fully covered by oil in the jar to help it keep longer.
Use a dry spoon rather than one that has been in something else first. Water carried into the jar is what turns the oil cloudy, and it takes days off the short window you already have.
