Most of the affinage apprentices we hear from learn to taste critically the same way — standing next to someone more experienced, in a cave, cutting into a wheel together. That option mostly disappeared last spring, and one member found her own way around it: a standing weekly video call with four other members, built entirely so nobody had to lose a year of learning to taste.
She's two years into an apprenticeship at a small creamery, working under a head cheesemaker who'd normally walk her through a tasting two or three times a week. When travel and shared tasting rooms stopped being realistic, that informal mentoring mostly stopped too — not because anyone decided it should, but because there wasn't an obvious substitute for standing over the same wheel together. So she asked around in one of our virtual course cohorts for anyone else missing the same thing, and four members said yes.
What a video tasting panel actually looks like
The format is simple and, by her account, took a few tries to get right. Each member cuts a comparable style at home — the group settled early on sticking to one category at a time, washed-rind one week, aged cheddar the next, rather than mixing styles and losing the ability to compare notes directly. Everyone describes what they're tasting out loud before anyone sees the others' notes, which turned out to matter more than she expected: it's easy to nod along with a more experienced taster's read if you see their notes first, and the group wanted independent impressions, not agreement.
What surprised her most wasn't the tasting itself — it was the range of caves represented on a single call. A humid basement operation, a converted shipping container, and a proper climate-controlled room were all tasting the same style category in the same week, and the differences in how their wheels developed became part of the conversation in a way that wouldn't have happened if everyone had been tasting from the same shared cave, as apprentices usually do.
What she'd tell someone starting the same way
Her advice for members trying something similar is specific: keep the group small enough that everyone gets real time to talk, agree on the category in advance so the comparison means something, and don't skip the step of writing your own notes before looking at anyone else's. She also said the hardest habit to build was patience with a slower call — a live tasting in person moves faster than five people unmuting themselves in sequence, and the group had to get comfortable with a much slower pace than they were used to.
The panel has quietly kept several apprentices' sensory development on track through a year when their usual mentoring simply wasn't available, and it's become enough of a fixture that a few members have asked whether the federation should formalize something like it. We don't have a program built around this yet, but if you're an apprentice or early-career member looking for the same kind of standing group, the Education Committee has started keeping an informal list of members interested in exactly this, matched loosely by style focus and schedule. Our Sensory Foundations course is still the right starting point if you're building this vocabulary from scratch, but as this member's group shows, the practice that makes it stick doesn't have to wait for an in-person room to become available again.
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.