“Let us. for instance, take the adjective vinney, evidently from the old-English finey, signifying, in the first place, mouldy ; and since mould generally blue or purplish, having gradually attached to it the signification of colour. Thus we find the mouldy cheese not only named “vinney,” but roan heifer called a “vinney heifer.” The most singular part, however, exemplifying the changes of words, remains to be told. Since cheese, from its colour, was called “vinney,” the word was applied to some particular cheese, which was mouldier and bluer than others, and the adjective was thus changed into a substantive. And we now have “vinney,” and the tautology, “blue vinney,” as the name of a particular kind of cheese distinguished from the other local cheeses,known as “ommary” and “rammel” “

reminds us of the Dorset Blue scandal of the late 1970s when, it is said, second-rate Stiltons were sold as “Dorset Blue” cheeses.

Philip Creed has compiled an extensive bibliography of Dorset Blue Cheese, at: www.academia.edu