Every year around this time, our Awards & Competition Committee starts fielding a particular flavor of question from members who've never entered before: not "how do I win," but "how do I know if this wheel is even good enough to send." One member wrote in this week describing exactly that spiral. She's a second-year apprentice at a small farmstead creamery, and she's spent the past month rotating between three washed-rind wheels she's set aside as possible entries, unable to decide whether any of them is actually competition-ready or whether she's just gotten too close to judge her own work.
That's not a rare feeling, and it's worth naming directly for anyone reading this in the same spot. Judging your own cheese after weeks of turning, washing, and smelling it every day is genuinely hard — you lose the outside perspective a stranger tasting it cold would have. It doesn't mean the wheel is bad. It means you're the wrong person to make the final call alone.
What actually helps at this stage
The advice our Awards & Competition Committee gives every year is simple and doesn't get less true for being repeated: get someone else's palate on it before entry deadlines, ideally someone who hasn't watched the wheel develop day by day. A fellow member, a mentor at another creamery, even a trusted counter buyer who tastes washed rinds regularly — anyone with distance from the process. Entry categories like Washed Rind draw comparisons across a wide range of styles and intensities, so a wheel that reads as "clearly the best of the batch" in your own cave can land anywhere in that field, and there's no way to know which without an outside taste.
The other piece of advice that surprises first-time entrants: judges score against the category's own standard, not against the most famous example of the style. A washed rind doesn't need to chase a specific regional archetype to score well; it needs to be a clean, well-executed expression of what it is. Overcorrecting toward someone else's rind color or aroma intensity, instead of trusting what your own affinage program actually produces, is one of the more common first-timer mistakes.
Where this goes next
If you're weighing a first competition entry the way this member is, the entry window and category requirements are worth reviewing closely — Washed Rind has its own submission specifics that differ from category to category. Our Advanced Sensory Evaluation course, if you have the calendar room before the deadline, is also a reasonable way to sharpen the exact judgment call you're wrestling with: telling the difference between "distinctive" and "off" in your own work.
Eligibility is worth double-checking too, since it trips up more first-timers than the sensory questions do. Competition rules generally require an entry to already be a product for sale to the public, not a prototype or a batch still in development — so the wheel you enter needs to be something you'd genuinely sell that day, not your best experimental run. Judging itself typically pairs a technical read, which deducts for flaws against a clean baseline, with an aesthetic read, which rewards standout character — two different lenses on the same wheel, which is part of why a single home taster's opinion isn't the whole picture.
Whatever she ends up sending, we hope she sends something. First entries are rarely the ones that win, but they're almost always the ones that teach a maker the most about their own cheese — about which flaws they'd stopped noticing, and which strengths they'd stopped crediting themselves for.
Next step: if you're on the fence about a first entry, find one outside taster before you decide, and check the category's submission window before it closes.
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.