Last Saturday my husband and I attended the 7th Annual Oregon Cheese Festival, just a few miles from our home in Central Point, Ore. It was the third such event for me and the fourth for Harry, and each year it gets a little bigger and better. The main event is held in a big tent adjoining the Rogue Creamery, home of international award-winning blue cheeses. For $15 (and $5 more for the chance to taste up to 10 wines, ales or spirits) you may stroll the tables and sample Oregon artisanal cheeses and chat with their makers. Added in to the mix are regional bakeries, chocolatiers, wineries and microbreweries. We arrived about half an hour after the doors (or tent flaps) opened and shortly before the first seminar — a guided cheese tasting — was to begin. Apparently few tickets for that event (at $25) had been sold, and we were offered a pair for free. Not ones to pass up such an opportunity, we accepted and headed across the street to a small tent for the class, led by San Francisco Chronicle cheese columnist and author Janet Fletcher. (Apparently, the Chronicle is the only paper in the country to have a full-time cheese writer and weekly column devoted solely to cheese.) The next hour was entertaining, educational and tasty (albeit cold on a 40-degree morning). We tasted five cheeses (a creamy Rivers Edge chèvre, a remarkably non-bland Willamette Valley Cheese Company creamy Havarti, Pholia Farm Hillis Peak aged Nigerian dwarf goat cheese, and Rogue Creamery’s five-year aged extra-sharp cheddar and Echo Mountain Blue) along with local white and red wines. I learned a lot more about how various cheeses are made; the characteristics of each type; what to look for (or beware of) when buying cheese; and how to serve, taste and store them. In addition to benefiting from Janet’s store of knowledge, we were fortunate that the cheesemakers from Willamette Valley, Rogue Creamery and Tillamook (a 100-year-old Oregon mainstay in the dairy industry) were present and added their perspectives and insights. We went forth then to stroll the big tent and sample (and, of course, buy) several cheeses, armed with a better understanding and more educated palates of the morsels before us. What a great way to spend the day! — Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor