On the last day of July, 30 professional cheese judges gathered in Burlington, Vermont, to sniff, taste, critique, and eventually spit (in order to avoid not intoxication, as with wine-tasting, but a horribly full stomach) more than a thousand cheeses—the largest such competition in U.S. his­tory. The American Cheese Society, the main trade association for small-scale cheese producers, holds the contest each year as a prelude to its annual conference. The ACS awards are prestigious and potentially lucrative. A Best in Class brings a small cheesemaker recognition beyond the local farmers’ market or food co-op and can guarantee a coveted spot in a top cheesemonger’s shop. A Best in Show brings national exposure and a permanent place in the pantheon of great American cheeses.

The competition is structured much like the Westminster Kennel Club’s big dog show, and indeed many entries rivaled their canine coun­terparts in furriness. The cheeses were organized into 22 broad groups: Unripened, Cheddars, Blue Mold, Smoked, and so on (think Working, Sporting, Herding, etc.). Each group was then divided into more specific judging categories. Cheddar, for example, included All Milk, Aged 12–24 Months; Flavor Added, Any Age; and so on (cf. Terriers: Airedale, American Staffordshire, Dandie Dinmont, etc.).

In the Burlington contest, 200 producers from 30 states and Canada scattered a record 1,208 cheeses over 88 categories. It was no surprise that Wisconsin led the field with 41 producers. Host Vermont, with the largest number of farmstead cheesemakers for its population, had the second-most producers in the competition. California, a cheese giant that makes nearly two billion pounds annually, was third in contestants.

A Best in Show brings a cheese national exposure and a permanent place in the pantheon of great American cheeses.

The majority of producers made “artisanal” cheeses—an unofficial industry coinage denoting cheeses made on a limited scale with a high degree of handcrafting. Many were farmstead cheeses, a more specific term lim­ited to cheeses made on a farm entirely of the milk of that farm’s own herd or flock. “Farmstead” is to cheese as “estate-bottled” is to wine or olive oil. These are the most prestigious of the artisan cheeses, the costliest to produce, and fetch the highest price.

Inspirations for cheese names varied. Most were simply descriptive: Bandage-Wrapped Cheddar, Super-Aged Gouda, Onion-Garlic Jack, and so on. Others were geographic: Detroit Street Brick, Hubbardston Blue, Monterey Jack. Some attempted puns, with mixed results: Old Kentucky Tomme (a tomme is a style of firm cheese typical of the French Savoie region), Little Bloom on the Prairie, Tomme Delay, Gore-Dawn-Zola (made by a woman named Dawn). Some California and Oregon producers paid tribute to another West Coast agricultural product: Barely Buzzed, Humboldt Fog, Purple Haze, Up In Smoke….

Cow’s milk cheeses dominated the field. Most came from Holsteins, the black-and-white cover girl of modern dairy farming. Some came from older, more traditional dairy breeds prized for their rich milk, such as Ayrshire and Swiss Brown, Jersey and Guernsey, Norwegian Red and Dutch Belted. Breed loyalty is strong among cheesemak­ers. One Ayrshire farmer asserts the impossibility of making good cheese from Jersey milk. A Jersey farmer claims to wash his equipment in Holstein milk. Many smaller cheesemak­ers milk goats—Roman-nosed Alpines, floppy-eared Nubians, Sables, and Toggenburgs. Goats are cheaper than cows and require less land. Their milk is tart and easily digested. Some of the farmer-cheesmakers milk sheep, which produce the rich­est milk of all (save water buffalo, yak, and reindeer).

The competition judges worked in pairs: one technical judge, with responsibility for identifying and diag­nosing defects in the cheese’s quality (uneven rind development, incorrect hole formation, inappro­priate bacterial growth), and one aesthetic judge, charged with evaluating the look, aroma, flavor, and “mouthfeel” of each entry. The technicals were serious types. Men mostly, they were scientists, professional cheese graders, dairy company exec­utives, in monogrammed white butcher smocks. They tasted quickly, in mincing bites, and were responsible for most of the spitting. The aesthet­ics were a more motley group. Younger as a whole, they were cheesemongers (an old term for cheese merchant, long in disuse but experiencing a resur­gence among hipper retailers), buyers, importers, and writers. Few seemed to begin their careers in the cheese business. Tattoos (nonmilitary) and piercings (at least visible ones) were exclusive to the aesthetic judges.

I was an aesthetic judge (though uninked and unpunctured). My technical partner was Roland Perrin, esteemed professor of France’s Ecole Nationale d’Industrie Laitière and president of the Concours National de Fromage. English is not among M. Perrin’s many world-renowned areas of expertise. My French is limited to a few elementary textbook dialogues useful only to determine the whereabouts of Sylvie (she’s at the pool). Still, with the art of pantomime and a hastily developed jargon-laced pidgin, we successfully judged our assigned categories, which follow.

Camembert Made from Cow’s Milk An easy category. The char­acteristics of a perfect Camembert are so well known that one can judge them as one would a breed of dog—against a defined set of ideal standards. A pug is rewarded for a double curl of its tail; a Camembert for an unblem­ished white-mold rind.

Judges are subjected to a brief sensitivity train­ing lecture from the Judging Chair, who reminds us that flavored cheeses are cheeses too and valid expressions of the cheesemaker’s art. Still, the assignment is met with groans.

Cultured Cow’s Milk Products The compe­tition was also open to yogurts, crème fraîche, sour cream, and other cul­tured milk products (which depend for their develop­ment on the fermentation of lactose to lactic acid). The prospect of tasting nine jars of unlabeled sour milk products at 8:00 a.m. would be daunting to many. Not me. Somewhere in my development as a cheesemonger I lost the critical human survival instinct to find sour milk disgusting. I find it sim­ply mature and complex.

Open Flavored Farmstead, All Milks Flavored cheeses are the short straws of the category draw. Judges are subjected to a brief sensitivity train­ing lecture from the Judging Chair, who reminds us that flavored cheeses are cheeses too and valid expressions of the cheesemaker’s art. Still, the assignment is met with groans. When judging fla­vored cheeses, one’s first task is to figure out the flavor. It’s not always clear. Jalapeño is easy to iden­tify. Fenugreek is not. At times we felt like forensic pathologists, picking a chunk of unidentified matter from a cheese with the tip of a knife and dissecting it in hopes of learning its nature. One cheesemaker entered a ball of sweetened cream cheese rolled in coconut. Delicious, but if this is cheese, then cheese­cake is cheese.

Washed-Rind Goat’s Milk We approached this category with trepidation. Unlike the innocent Camembert, with its delicate bloom of downy pure-white mold, washed-rind cheeses like Livarot, Alsatian Munster, Epoisses, and Limburger are ripened through the action of a sticky, fetid bacterial smear that stains a cheese orange and gives it the aroma of unwashed feet. This is a difficult style of cheese to master, and a lot can go haywire.

Alas, none of our cheeses made Best in Show. I will tell you the win­ner shortly, but first some background.

The American artisan cheese industry has grown dramatically in the 24 years since Frank Kosikowski, a Cornell dairy science professor and author of the cult classic Cheese and Fermented Milk Foods, founded the American Cheese Society. Membership has soared to about 1,200. The num­ber of entries in the cheese competition itself has risen from 665 in 2004 to more than 1,200 this year. In his recent book, The Atlas of American Artisan Cheese, Jeffrey Roberts, a founder of the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese, cites fewer than 75 artisan cheesemakers nationwide in 1990. By 2006, there were 400, enough finally to war­rant an atlas.

Some California and Oregon cheese names seemed to pay tribute to another West Coast agricultural product: Barely Buzzed, Humboldt Fog, Purple Haze, Up In Smoke...

It is tempting to compare this growth to the rise of the American wine industry over the past two decades. And not just because cheese and wine are so tasty together. They are similar foods. Both harness the miracle of fermentation, the activity of bacteria on a simple commodity (milk or grape juice). Both are as much art as science, cherished for their unique capacity to speak of the land and the tradition in which they are born—what the cogno­scenti call terroir.

Cheese and wine have traced similar paths to success. Both came to America with European immigrants seeking to recreate the traditional staples of their homelands. Both entered a long dark age of industrialization and standardization, and have spent decades repairing a devastated brand and fighting to capture a suspicious market against an overwhelm­ing tide of high-quality European competition. To this day, the very expression “American cheese” elicits chuckles and images of convenient, individually wrapped slices and aerosolized whizzes.

What has been good for wine has been good for cheese. The rising wealth and strong dollar of the 1990s sent Americans flocking to Europe, returning with a new understanding and appreci­ation of continental eating. Food has emerged as hip entertainment, with its own vibrant press, TVnetworks, and rock-star chefs. Movies about food and wine have found large, sophisticated audi­ences (“Eat, Drink, Man, Woman,” “Sideways,” “Big Night,” “Like Water for Chocolate,” “Ratatouille”). Increased concern for health and a growing sus­picion of conventional agriculture, spurred by crises like mad cow, bird flu, and tainted spin­ach, have focused the nation on small-scale local farming and the sustainability and traceability of our food supply. Meanwhile, Whole Foods Market has planted 263 stores around the country (many through acquisitions of regional chains) since the first opened in 1980. And who could have pre­dicted the French Paradox—the notion, according to a bestseller about the eating habits of France, that you can eat plenty of fat and stay slim? Or Dr. Atkins urging eager dieters to eat pork and but­terfat? More recently, the flaccid dollar and robust euro have made American wines and cheeses seem veritable bargains.

Still, despite the explosive growth of the industry as a whole, small-scale cheesemaking remains a tough way to make a living. Farmland is expensive, and equipment is costly and obscure, often imported piece by piece directly from Europe. The learn­ing curve is steep. The hours are brutal, and the work is backbreaking. Skilled labor is hard to find. Aging, a process dur­ing which a cheese gets much of its characteris­tic identity and market value, can cost a cheesemaker as much as 50 cents per pound per month in storage, labor, and shrink­age (not theft, actual shrinkage). Not to mention the costs of fuel, marketing, testing, regulation, and so on.

The plan is simple. The Kehlers will purchase young cheeses from producers, age them in their cellars, and assume the responsibility for their marketing and distribution. Cheesemakers get a quicker return on their investment and should see a sharp rise in profitability.

A recent Vermont study suggests that most small-scale farmstead cheese operations in that state show only a small profit after a few years of business. Can profitability be increased? According to the same study, most cheesemakers already sell 100 percent of the cheeses they produce. But farm­stead cheesemaking, unlike the software business, is peculiarly unscalable. Expanding the herd, buying or leasing more land, or adding new vat capacity are beyond the reach of all but the larg­est producers and the wealthiest of gentlemen farmers. A non-farm­stead producer—one who purchases milk—can expand if capital is available and if there is a steady source of quality milk (a big if). A farmstead cheese­maker cannot purchase milk without losing its prestigious farmstead designation.

Nor can you just raise prices. Here cheese is dif­ferent from wine. No matter how rare or how good, cheese will never achieve wine’s luxury status. Some small-production “cult” wines, fueled by Robert Parker’s ratings and by demand from collectors, fetch hundreds, even thousands of dollars at their release. The most expensive cheese costs about $50 per pound retail (most American cheeses top out at about $30). And you can’t collect cheese. It rots.

Mateo and Andrew Kehler think they have an answer. The Kehlers own Jasper Hill Farm, one of America’s best and most dynamic new farmstead cheesemak­ers (Mateo makes the cheese; Andrew man­ages the herd of Ayrshire cows). Last year they broke ground on Black River Cellars, an ambitious, modern complex of cheese-aging caves dug into a hillside on their Greensboro, Vermont, farm. The plan is simple. The Kehlers will purchase young cheeses from producers throughout the region, age them in their cellars, and assume the responsibility for their marketing and distribution. Cheesemakers get a quicker return on their investment and, freed from the costly burden of aging and marketing, should see a sharp rise in profitability. Black River achieves critical economies of scale in labor and logistics, and in the process strengthens the viabil­ity of its own cheesemaking operation.

Jeffrey Roberts, a founder of the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese, cites fewer than 75 artisan cheesemakers nationwide in 1990. By 2006, there were 400, enough finally to warrant an atlas.

In Europe, affineurs, master cheese ripen­ers, have operated this way for generations, buying young (“green”) cheeses from farmers, rip­ening them, and bringing them to market. But the Kehlers’ plan is different. The name on the label of most European cheese is not the cheesemaker’s but the affineur’s. The cheese’s provenance is obscured. The farmer trades the brand for quick cash. The Kehlers’ cheeses will bear both the Black River name and the cheesemaker’s. The “story” behind the cheese, so critical in mar­keting artisan foods, is preserved.

The best story is Best in Show. Some 86 cheeses, all blue-ribbon winners in their catego­ries, were laid out in the ballroom of the Sheraton Burlington. Judges tasted and retasted every cheese, each voting for the grand-prize winner. It turned out to be Aged Raclette, by Leelanau Cheese Company of Suttons Bay, Michigan. (Michigan is conveniently mitten shaped. Look at the back of your left hand. Spread your pinky slightly from your ring finger to form the Leelanau Peninsula and Grand Traverse Bay. Suttons Bay is below and to the right of your pinky cuticle.)

Leelanau’s Raclette is based on the classic cheese of the majestic Swiss Valais, where herders prop half wheels by the hearth, scraping the rich melting cheese and bits of burnt rind onto potatoes and cornichons. The cheese was superb. Its brushed chestnut-colored rind showed few blemishes. The paste was supple and smooth, its few scattered eyelets well formed and dewy. It had a distant aroma of roasting hazel­nuts, a deep-brooding caramelized sugar flavor, and a salty, tinglingly sharp finish. For the record, I ranked it fourth.

Where to Find Great Artisan Cheeses:

Murray's Cheese Shop
254 Bleecker Street
New York, New York 10014
www.murrayscheese.com
This is a Greenwich Village institution, complete with a warren of cheese-ripening caves. Superb artisan cheeses from across the nation are available online. Try Mountain Valley Cheddar by Amish farmstead cheesemaker Goot Essa, at $12.99/lb., or Pleasant Ridge Reserve, a raw cow’s milk product from Mike Gingrich of Wisconsin, $28.99/lb.

Zingerman’s
620 Phoenix Drive Ann Arbor, Michigan 48108
(888) 636-8162
www.zingermans.com
A pioneer and still at the cutting edge, Zingerman’s of Ann Arbor has America’s best food catalog, hands down. Ask about Zingerman’s Creamery’s own award-winning cheeses like Detroit Street Brick, a creamy goat cheese, $29/lb., and Bridgewater Round, a double cream cheese, $20 to $22/lb.

Cowgirl Creamery at Tomales Bay Foods
80 Fourth Street
Point Reyes Station, California 94956
(415) 663-9335
www.cowgirlcreamery.com
Cowgirl Creamery is a superb source of West Coast artisan cheeses. Try the Red Hawk, 2003’s ACS Best in Show, a triple cream cheese made from organic cow’s milk, $22.75/lb. Also, Pierce Point, an herb-covered whole-milk cheese for the fall–winter season, $21.75/lb.

Rubiner’s Cheesemongers & Grocers
264 Main Street
Great Barrington, Massachusetts 01230
(413) 528-0488
My own little shop in western Massachusetts, specializing in artisan cheeses of the Northeast. I recommend Hillman Farm Harvest, a Berkshire Hills goat’s milk masterpiece from Carolyn Hillman, $26.95/lb. Also, Great Hill Blue, which is Roquefort-like but made from raw Guernsey cow’s milk from Tim and Tina Stone, $14.50/lb.

A final note: The winning cheese at this year’s ACS competition, Leelanau Aged Raclette, is available through:
Leelanau Cheese Company
10844 E. Revold Road
Suttons Bay,
Michigan 49682
(231) 271-2600
www.blackstarfarms.com/creamery

Matthew Rubiner owns Rubiner’s Cheesemongers & Grocers and rubi’s café in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts.

Image credit: photographs by Todd Zawistowski. Top to bottom [1]: John and Ann Hoyt age wheels of their award-winning Raclette cheese in their cellars in Suttons Bay, Michigan, for about two years. [2]: A note from the Leelanau cheesemakers to customers, asking them to limit their purchases because there’s not enough to go around.[3]: As rubber gloves show, the Hoyts are careful about sanitation. The other photographs show John and Ann pulling the curds (the solid part of separated milk) that will go into the wheels of cheese. The curds must be very fine. The Leelanau creamery is built so guests (even small ones) can watch the entire production. Above: A finished Raclette wheel.[4]: The cellar, built into a hillside in Suttons Bay, Michigan. Above: Inside the cellar are stored more than 2,000 wheels for aging. Every day, each wheel is given a half-turn and salt brine is brushed on.