Observations About Wales:

From Travel To Business & Politics

first published in   April 1997

The Cheese Stands Alone

“Hide not your light under a bushel basket” -- the New Testament

“Blessed are the cheesemakers” -- Monty Python

Blas ar Cymru, a taste of Wales, arrived in New York City on March the first as a handful of the city’s top gourmet emporiums welcomed Bryson Craske from Abergavenny Fine Foods Ltd. and his cache of delicious Welsh cheeses. Mr. Craske’s  samples included Red Dragon, which is flavored with mustard and Welsh ale, a mild, green-tinted Tintern and a delicate Caerphilly that is totally unlike the crumbly dry cheese that Americans expect when buying Caerphilly.

A misty rain fell all St. David’s Day on New York City. Inside Zabar’s, a gourmet emporium located on Manhattan’s upper west side, a few hungry shoppers sampled the cheeses, while shy ones wished they could. Mr. Craske answered the few queries he got about his handmade and washed rind cheeses in an accent that evoked the rolling slopes of the Breacon Beacons. Most samplers, however, merely wanted confirmation as to the nationality of the cheeses. “Yes, it’s Welsh,” and “It’s cheese from Wales” were two sentences Mr. Craske employed most often that morning.

Much to this reporter’s surprise, Mr. Craske also had been in town last year marketing his family’s cheeses.  But then, as now, promotion of the event fell between the floorboards. This is extraordinary when one notes that the cheese samplings were not merely a pie-in-the-sky family affair, but were co-sponsored by a major airline, a British consumer trade group and a high profile tourist board, to mention a few.

The airline did magnanimously furnish ten pairs of round trip tickets for a vacation in Wales for the contest in association with the cheese sampling. However, in a truly unbusinesslike move they neglected to tell anyone about it. In view of the airline’s generosity it would be churlish to say they did any worse than hide their own light. Still and all, wouldn’t a hundred times as many people have come to delight in Welsh cheese if they knew it was being served, and that they could win a UK vacation by doing little more than filling out an entry form? Wouldn’t it have been smart for one of the co-sponsors to engage a good public relations firm to promote this event? After all, it was more than just Welsh comestibles being introduced to snack-loving Americans. This little cheese event could have been the first notes of an overture that would have finally introduced the whole country of Wales to Americans. How are Americans going to know, love, visit and support Wales if they are never made aware of it?