If your make sheet has never included the word "strap," this workshop is aimed squarely at you. Cedar Cut & Wrap runs on January 5 in Courtenay, and it's one of the more specialized sessions on next year's calendar — a full day on wrapping soft, washed-rind wheels in cedar and spruce bark straps, the technique behind some of the gooiest, most spoon-ready cheeses in the case.
Wrapping isn't decoration. A bark strap acts like a girdle, holding a high-moisture wheel together as the rind softens past the point where it could support its own weight, and the wood itself changes the finished cheese — a resinous, faintly smoky note that a plain washed rind never picks up. Producers have been doing this for a couple of centuries in parts of Europe, hand-harvesting the strips in early summer and setting them aside to use through the following year's aging season. The workshop's instructors source their own straps the same way, and part of the day covers how to prepare and store bark so it's pliable enough to wrap without tearing when you need it in the cave, not just when it happens to be soft.
What the day actually covers
The morning is hands-on: soaking bark strips, timing the wrap against a wheel's weeping stage (too early and the strap won't hold; too late and the rind has already started to slump), and securing it without crushing the paste underneath. The afternoon moves into the washing side of the rind — brine strength, wash frequency, and how to read whether a rind is developing the orange-pink coloring you want or heading somewhere you don't. Members who've taken our Affinage Fundamentals course will recognize the vocabulary; this workshop assumes that foundation and builds a narrow, technical skill on top of it rather than re-teaching the basics.
It's a paid, in-person session with limited bench space, which is typical for anything this hands-on — you can't learn strap tension from a slide. If you're weighing whether to travel for a single-day workshop, this is the kind of session where being in the room matters more than usual, since a lot of the judgment call (is the wheel ready, is the strap too tight) is something you feel more than see.
Who should sign up, and why we keep scheduling these
This one's for members already making soft, high-moisture wheels who want to add a washed-rind or bark-wrapped line to what they sell, plus affineurs looking to formalize a technique they've been doing by feel. It's not a beginner session — if you haven't made a washed rind before, our Food Safety & HACCP Certificate coursework and a season of practice with wash routines will serve you better first. Registration is open through the member portal, and the Events Committee has said seats are going faster than usual for a January date, likely because it lands the week most members are back at their benches after the holiday slowdown and looking for something to plan around.
Specialty and artisan cheese categories have kept growing even as some broader grocery cheese categories slowed this year, and a lot of that growth is concentrated in exactly the kind of distinctive, hard-to-replicate styles a bark-wrapped washed rind represents. A wheel like this doesn't compete with mass-produced cheese on price, and it isn't supposed to — it competes on being the thing nobody else on the shelf has. Members who've added a washed-rind line in the past couple of years have told us it changed the conversation at their counter, giving staff something distinctive to talk about instead of just another cheddar. That's part of why the Events Committee keeps scheduling technique-specific workshops like this one instead of only general affinage sessions: a full introductory course teaches you to manage a cave, while a single-day, single-technique workshop teaches you to add one specific product line without re-learning everything else. If Cedar Cut & Wrap fills before you register, similar technique days tend to repeat on the calendar roughly once a year, so a spot on the waitlist this time is a reasonable bet for next January.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.