Barrys Bay has made cheddar at the head of Akaroa Harbour since 1895, and it is the last cheese factory left on Banks Peninsula.
There were nine dairy co-operatives on the peninsula when it started. Eight of them are gone.
The cheese that survived them is a cheddar with two skins: a cloth-formed rind, and a coat of wax over the top of it.
In This Article
What Is Barrys Bay Cheddar?
It is a cow's milk cheddar made at Duvauchelle, on the road between Christchurch and Akaroa, from milk taken off local grass-fed herds.
The original factory opened on 6 October 1895 at Onawe, and the building in use today was put up in 1953 and opened by Keith Holyoake.
The milk only runs from September to May, which is the grazing season, so the cheese is made in a window rather than year round.
The company still calls its long-aged cheddar by an old name, Wainui, and that cheese is the direct descendant of the rinded cheddar the factory built its reputation on.
Everything else in the range grew out of that one cheese, including a blue and several Dutch styles that would have been unrecognisable to the 1895 co-operative.
The cheese was taken seriously early. In 1898 the Governor called it the nicest cheese he had tasted in the colony, which is the sort of line a small factory does not forget.
It kept winning. Barrys Bay took the British Dairy Show's Perpetual Challenge Cup in 1950 and the Dofo Cup for the best cheddar imported into Europe in 1986.
Why Is It Bound in Cloth and Then Sealed in Wax?
Most cheddar gets one or the other. Cloth lets a wheel breathe and dry, and wax stops it doing either.
Barrys Bay does both, in that order, and it is the only company in New Zealand that finishes a vintage cheddar this way.
Neither step explains the cheese on its own; the order does. The cheese is pressed in cloth, then left on white pine shelves and turned and wiped by hand until a rind grows on it.
That drying stage is where a clothbound cheddar earns its flavour. Moisture leaves through the cloth, the paste concentrates, and the surface builds the savoury, slightly earthy character that a sealed cheese never develops.
Turning is not housekeeping. A wheel left on one face settles, and wiping keeps the surface growth from getting ahead of the cheese underneath.
Then the wax goes on and the drying stops.
An English clothbound cheddar spends its whole life uncovered and loses weight the entire time, which is a large part of why it costs what it does.
Sealing the wheel after the rind has formed stops that loss. The cheese keeps the character the cloth gave it and the maker keeps the kilos.
The old export figure makes the point. Wheels were cured at the factory for fourteen days before they were waxed and crated, which is long enough to set a rind and short enough to survive a sea voyage to England.
A cheese built to be shipped had to be a cheese that stopped changing. Wax was how you did that in 1900, and the factory never saw a reason to stop.
Size is the other half of it. An eighty-pound truckle has very little surface for its weight, so a rind on it costs almost nothing in wasted cheese.
Shrink that to a one kilogram piece and the maths inverts. The rind would eat a real share of a small block, which is another reason the wax stayed on when the format came down.
What Happened to the Other Eight Factories?
Until the 1970s almost everything Barrys Bay made went to England, and so did almost everything its eight neighbours made.
Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973, and New Zealand dairy lost the guaranteed market it had been built around.
That is the event the peninsula did not survive. The co-operatives had one customer, that customer left, and eight of the nine closed.
Barrys Bay stayed open by shrinking. It once made more than 400 tonnes a year across five open vats. it now makes around 70 tonnes in one.
The format shrank with it. Eighty-pound truckles of 36 kilograms became 20 kilogram blocks, and those became the one and two kilogram pieces a New Zealand shopper buys.
Selling at home instead of abroad changed the cheese into something you cut rather than something you crate.
Five vats to one is the part worth sitting with. A factory that gives up four vats is choosing to be small rather than failing to be big.
That choice is why the make is still done by hand. At 70 tonnes a year there is no volume to justify the machinery, and no machinery to force the recipe to change.
Why Does a Cheddar Factory Make Gouda and Gruyère?
Losing the English market meant selling to New Zealanders, and New Zealanders were not going to buy 70 tonnes of one cheddar.
Colby arrived in the late 1970s as the first answer, and that softer American style was a sensible choice because it is close enough to cheddar to make in the same room.
The bigger change came in 1989, when the factory started making Dutch styles with help from a Dutch cheesemaker.
That is why a nineteenth-century cheddar works now sells a sweet aged Dutch wheel, an eyed Dutch style and an alpine-style wheel alongside its own cheese.
The range also carries a blue, an English crumbly, a red-rinded Canterbury cheese and a shelf of smoked and flavoured cheddars.
Not everything stuck. There was a period of making a sheep's milk feta that did not become part of the permanent range.
The pattern in all of it is a factory answering a shop rather than a shipping schedule. Visitors buy a mixed bag, and a mixed bag needs more than one cheese in it.
The cheddar is still the reason the place exists. Everything added since 1970 is the trade that keeps the cheddar being made.
| Cheese | Where it came from | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|
| Wainui vintage cheddar | The original 1895 rinded cheddar | The cheese the factory is known for, and the only one finished in cloth and wax. |
| Mild, medium, tasty and sharp cheddar | The same make, held for different lengths | The everyday range that replaced the English export trade. |
| Colby | Added in the late 1970s | Close enough to cheddar to make on the same plant, softer and milder to sell. |
| Gouda, Maasdam and Gruyere | Added from 1989 with Dutch help | A domestic market wanted variety, and these are what the new expertise could make. |
| Peninsula Blue, Cheshire, Canterbury Red | Later additions | Counter range for a factory shop that now sells directly to visitors. |
How Old Is It? The Maker Does Not Say
Barrys Bay publishes no maturation figures at all. The shop lists a price, a weight and a sentence of description, and that is the whole of it.
So the range is named rather than dated, and the names are the only ladder you get: mild, then medium, then tasty, then sharp, then the aged Onawe, then the Wainui vintage.
The one number the company does state is the fourteen days of curing before waxing, and that describes the rind rather than the age.
Treat the ladder as a texture guide and it works. Each step is drier, firmer and more savoury than the one below it.
The vintage is where the earthiness the maker describes actually shows up, and it is the only one that will crumble rather than bend.
The silence about ages is worth reading as information rather than as an oversight. A cheese made in one vat from seasonal milk does not mature on a fixed schedule.
Wheels are turned and wiped until they are ready, and ready is a judgement rather than a date on a card.
Which One Should You Buy?
Buy the Wainui vintage if you want the cheese this factory is actually known for, because it is the one that carries the cloth rind and the long shelf time.
It is sold in 140 gram pieces for about ten and a half New Zealand dollars, which is a tasting portion rather than a cooking block.
Buy the sharp cheddar if you want something to eat through the week. The maker describes it as mature and creamy with extra bite, and it comes in a one kilogram block.
The mild and medium are the everyday cheeses and there is nothing distinctive about them, which is not a criticism of a factory that has to pay its bills.
Skip the flavoured cheddars if this is your first purchase. Chilli, cumin and balsamic will tell you nothing about what the place makes.
If you are buying two, take the vintage and the sharp rather than two steps of the everyday ladder. The gap between them is where you can taste what the cloth did.
The Dutch styles are worth a piece each on a second visit, but they are a 1989 project rather than the reason to come.
Where Can You Actually Buy It?
The factory shop at Duvauchelle sells the full range and is open every day except Christmas Day, with a window onto the make room.
Watching the cheese being made is a real part of the visit, because it is still made and cut by hand rather than by machine.
New Zealand supermarkets and delis carry the everyday cheddars, and the vintage turns up in specialist shops more often than in a chiller.
Outside New Zealand it is difficult. The company ships domestically by overnight courier and the volume simply is not there for export.
The mail order has its own quirks. Orders go out Monday to Wednesday, and the company says plainly that it does not recommend rural delivery, which can run to five days.
Collection at the factory is free and usually ready within a day, which is the sensible option if you are anywhere near the peninsula.
The seasonal make comes into this as well. Milk runs from September to May, so what is on the shelf late in winter is what was made and held, not what was made that week.
No maturation figures are published at all. The named grades are the only ladder you get, so treat them as a guide to dryness rather than to months.
How Do You Keep a Waxed Rinded Cheddar?
An unopened waxed piece is the easiest cheese in your fridge, because the wax is doing exactly the job it was invented for.
Once you cut it, that protection is gone and you are handling a normal cut cheddar.
Waxed paper is the right wrapper for the cut face. Plastic film against the paste will make it sweat and sour within days.
Do not cut the wax away from the whole piece in advance. It is the only thing keeping the rest of it from drying out.
The rind under the wax is edible and is part of what you paid for on the vintage, since it carries the savoury edge the drying stage built.
How Is It Different From English Clothbound Cheddar?
The comparison is fair and it is the one to make, because a fully clothbound wheel is where this cheese came from.
A wheel that stays in cloth keeps taking on flavour from its own surface for as long as it sits there, and it keeps drying out.
Waxing after fourteen days stops both processes at the same moment, so you get the beginning of that character and none of the rest of it.
The result is a cleaner, milder cheese than an English clothbound of the same age, and a much cheaper one.
Neither approach is the better one. They are answers to different problems, and the problem here was a factory nine thousand miles from its customers.
If you want the full version, the Canadian island one and the Vermont cave-aged one both stay in cloth to the end.
What cheddar is in general, and how the cheddaring step itself works, belongs to the wider family and is not repeated here.
| What differs | What it means when you eat it |
|---|---|
| Cloth for about two weeks, then wax | Rind flavour starts and then stops, so the paste stays cleaner. |
| Weight loss halts at waxing | Cheaper per kilo, because the maker is not selling evaporated water. |
| Sealed surface through maturation | No mould character and no cave note, however long it is held. |
| Ages not published | You buy by name and by texture rather than by months. |
SOURCES & REFERENCES
Barrys Bay Cheddar FAQ
Three things the cloth, the wax and the missing ages leave open.
Both, in sequence. The wheel is formed and cured in cloth until a rind develops, then waxed and matured under the wax.
The company does not publish it. The only figure it states is fourteen days of curing before waxing, which describes the rind rather than the maturation.
Not readily. Production runs at around 70 tonnes a year and the company ships domestically, so it is a factory shop and New Zealand retail cheese. That is a reversal: until the 1970s almost all of it went to England.
