Wensleydale cheese has been awarded official protection by the European Union.
The Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status means that no producer outside the designated area can call a cheese Yorkshire Wensleydale.
The Wensleydale Creamery, based in the Dales, has waged a long campaign to achieve the status and will now add the PGI symbol to its packaging.
The EU regime has stringent requirements to safeguard the standards of all European products. The special protection categories “identify products and foodstuffs farmed and produced to exacting specifications”.
While a number of food and drink products from the UK have achieved PGI, the list is not as long as in some other countries, possibly due to the industrialisation of agriculture.
But Wensleydale now joins its brothers-in-arms, such as the Cornish Pasty, the Melton Mowbray pork pie, Cornish clotted cream, Arbroath Smokies, Jersey Royal potatoes, and a host of others embracing fruit, vegetables, fresh meat and fish, cider, perry, beer and distilled drinks.
Wensleydale cheese was first made by French Cistercian monks from the Roquefort region who settled in Yorkshire.
