Meet the team

Graham Rolls, Maturation Stores Manager

What is your role at Wyke?

I’m in charge of the cheese stores, where the cheese matures. They’re kept at 13º, to replicate the old barns when Ivy Clothier started making cheese here, so you cool in the summer and heat in the winter. But most of the job is about making sure the right cheese goes to the right places, from our sites in Bruton and Wincanton. These days I work in our store in Bruton, where I’m directly responsible for around 10,000 tonnes  of cheese. 

I’m also involved with the grading process for the Cheddar, with Di [Cox, Master Cheese Grader] and [Production Director and third-generation cheesemaker] Tom Clothier. I make sure all the right blocks are selected with the correct dates and line them up along the corridor in the cheese store with a row which is 10 days old and another other row with two- and three-month-old cheese. We grade it depending on how it’s maturing, and make a note of the characteristics, until it’s ready for packing.

And I also show visitors round the store, tasting the cheese and seeing how we do it. We then get them to sign the wooden maturing boxes, so at the moment we’ve got signatures from Ukraine, China, Japan, all over the world.

How long have you worked here?

It’s 40 years now, so I was given a Long Service Award at the Bath & West Show this year. I started on the packing lines as a tipper-outer in our store in Wincanton. I had to tip out the cheese, put it on pallets and then it was ready for packing. There were just two of us, then it just got bigger and bigger as time went by. I got promoted without being promoted: one minute I was a tipper-outer, the next minute I was a forklift driver, then I was in charge of the store – I got promoted without knowing about it.

What are the biggest things to change since you started at Wyke?

The size of the business. I started with just 20 staff in Wincanton and now it’s over 320 in Bruton and Wincanton. When I first worked in the cheese stores, everything was done by paper and hand. I was responsible for matching the monthly stock take and I can remember on the odd occasion being there till past 11 at night trying to find one single block of cheese of 300,000. Now, with the technology, all the stock is scanned in and out and held on an internal database system.

There’s lots that hasn’t changed, though. It’s still a family-run business, where the directors know who you are – but then I was here before them! Their dad, John Clothier, gave me a cheese-grading iron when he was the boss and I first started grading Cheddar. He gave it to me to look after so that it was there for him when he came for grading every Wednesday and I kept it after he retired for when he occasionally comes back to grade.

Are there any other honours your long service has brought?

I judge cheese at two of the shows, at Frome Agricultural & Cheese Show and Mid-Somerset. I’m not allowed near the Cheddar, because you would know your own cheese, so I judge Stiltons and all sorts instead. That’s quite an honour.

Do you think there’s anything left for you to learn?

Oh, I don’t know it all. You never know it all. If you ask Rich Clothier, he’ll say Cheddar is a dark art. I’m not really on the science side of it but I’ve learned a lot from experience: I could walk into the store and I could tell straight away if there was something wrong with the temperature.

And there’s no danger of you retiring, we hope?

Not yet! I was 60 this year and it’s the new 40, I’ve been told. I like to do a good job, make sure it goes right for the company, the right cheese goes to the right places.