For a slice of Vermont farm life, say cheese

As I visited with cheese makers Jonathan and Kate Wright at their Taylor Farm in southern Vermont, Fiona the cat was delivering kittens on the kitchen floor, and the phone rang repeatedly with customers placing orders. Kate joked that the callers actually were their neighbors, on cue.

In truth, the Wrights, who make Gouda on their land in Londonderry, don’t need to fake it. Like several other former dairy farmers in this state, they have prospered by making cheese.

Say “cheese,” and Vermont doesn’t leap to mind. Vermont and maple syrup, yes. Although the state produces 37% of the nation’s maple syrup, the sweet stuff pours only about $125 million a year into its economy. Cheese, a major slice of the billion-dollar dairy industry, accounts for $400 million. Feta, brie, Camembert, provolone, Gruyere -- all are made here, 70 million pounds a year.

That’s a drop in the milk pail compared with leader Wisconsin or with California, one of the nation’s top five. But little Vermont is first in farmstead cheeses: those made down on the farm using the farm’s animals. And its 34 licensed cheese makers have been winning ribbons galore.

In early September, I drove from Putney in southern Vermont to Alburg, three miles from the Canadian border, visiting six cheese makers, all of which welcome visitors. I walked through 36-degree rooms where cheeses aged, watched curd being shoveled from great steel vats into molds and cheddar being hand-dipped into caldrons of hot wax.

Cheese making in Vermont dates back 200 years, when farmers started making cheddar to use milk that would have spoiled without refrigeration.

“It’s kind of come full circle,” said Jonathan Wright. “Just in the last 10 or 12 years there’s been this resurgence of artisanal cheese makers.”

Vermont Shepherd

At Vermont Shepherd in Putney, David, 42, and Cindy Major, 40, make cheese with milk from their 200 sheep. David grew up on this farm, which then produced lamb and wool, but economics steered them to cheese.

“The sheep were there,” Cindy says. “The property was there.... One day my dad said, ‘Why don’t you start milking the sheep and making cheese?’ ” Cindy, who grew up in Manhattan, said, “I had no idea you could milk sheep.”

Their first natural rind cheese was, she said, “the worst cheese ever -- despicable. It was like eating a hockey puck.” But, determined to sell it, off she went to Dean & DeLuca in New York, whose cheese buyer sampled it, “spat it out and said, ‘This is horrible. Never, ever bring me cheese like this again.’ I walked out and burst into tears.”

In the winter of 1993, the Majors went to the French Pyrenees to find out what they were doing wrong. “The French farmers tasted our cheese and just shook their heads,” she said. The French told them not to freeze their milk and to stop working against the cheese with mold inhibitors.

Six months after they returned, their Vermont Shepherd, a semihard raw-milk cheese that is their signature product, won a blue ribbon as best U.S. farmhouse cheese. The same Dean & DeLuca buyer deemed it “absolutely delicious.”

Vermont Shepherd produces 40,000 pounds a year. Two border collies bring the sheep in twice daily for milking. The sheep are bred on the farm, with Dave mixing breeds to produce “self-confident sheep, ready to give milk.”

Vermont Shepherd, 875 Patch Road, Putney; (802) 387-4473, www.vermontshepherd.com.

Taylor Farm

The cheese-making Wrights, Jon and Kate, live with their three young daughters in a weathered gray farmhouse on land Jon worked as a teenager. “We came here as tenant farmers” in 1989, he said. They planned to sell milk but found it tough going. Their lives changed one day in 1998 when they took a tour that included a visit to a cheese maker.

They marketed their first Gouda in 1999 and now sell 7,000 pounds a year.

When I arrived in late morning, Jon, wearing a long yellow rubber apron over his clothes, had been at work since 4 a.m. and with a helper had turned 350 pounds of Gouda into molds to be pressed. We walked through the barn, where there was a cow’s name at each stall -- Calamity, Petunia, etc. “They file in here and go right to their own stalls,” he said.

Kate, a substitute teacher, markets the cheese and, with her interest in education, hopes to expand the farm’s on-site programs for schoolchildren. Cheese was a wise decision, she said, adding, “You’re not going to ship a gallon of milk to California.”

Taylor Farm, 825 Route 11, Londonderry; (802) 824-5690, www.taylorfarmvermont.com.

Grafton Village Cheese

Grafton Village Cheese Co. is in Grafton, a town of 600 so picture perfect that the local garage has a steeple and Grafton Cheese its own covered bridge. This midsize cheddar producer is under the umbrella of the not-for-profit Windham Foundation, founded in 1963 to revive the dying village, once a wool-producing center. Profits go to the foundation.

“We literally make cheese the same way as 200 years ago,” said Grafton spokesman Chad Bessette, save for some mechanized stirring and the use of frozen culture.

Bessette handed me a baseball cap (health regulations) and led me into a room where two cheese makers were shoveling curd from huge vats into rectangular metal hoops, each holding 60 pounds.

In the cheese making room, Scott Fletcher, wearing white coveralls and tall rubber boots, was cleaning up. Fletcher came here in 1967, Grafton Village Cheese’s start-up year, to assist a local farmer who had been hired as cheese maker. “I graduated from high school Thursday, and I started Monday. I was 17 years old.”

Vice President Peter Mohn likes to say Fletcher “teaches milk how to be cheese. He creates this cheese as an artist would create an oil painting, using his hands and his eyes and his nose as his brushes.”

Grafton Village Cheese Co., 533 Townshend Road, Grafton; (800) 472-

3866, www.graftonvillagecheese.com.

Cabot Creamery

Cabot Creamery trucks rumble down Vermont highways bearing the slogan, “Why can’t all cheese be this good?” Cabot, with four plants, is a major maker. I visited the Cabot plant, a complex of tidy red-trimmed white buildings in a village of 1,000. Cabot cheddar is renowned and, at the visitor center, tourists were nibbling bite-sized samples as they browsed through a shop selling all manner of things Vermont.

I chatted with plant manager Marcel Gravel, who came to Cabot as a “grunt” -- a cheese waxer -- in 1970 at the age of 15. He “cooked cheese for 10 or 12 years” while earning his high school diploma in night school and taking business courses at Cornell University.

Every day at this plant, which is highly automated, 13 people make 70,000 pounds of cheese.

Cabot Creamery, 2878 Main St., Cabot; (800) 837-4261, www.cabotcheese.com.

Lakes End Cheese

When I arrived at Lakes End Cheese in Alburg, on the Lake Champlain shore, Joanne James was squeezing chocolate from a plastic bottle into bonbon molds to make her Shoreline Chocolates. Candy making was her first business, but cheese is her current passion.

Her four Lakes End cheeses include hard, aged cow and sheep’s milk varieties and fresh, soft chevre from milk from her 29 Toggenburg goats. Although she had become bored with chocolate, she had never considered cheese until being given goat milk that she didn’t know how to use.

She read up, went to workshops, networked. In the spring of 2000 she began marketing her cheese. She now makes about 75 pounds a week and every Wednesday drives 45 miles south to Burlington to deliver to markets.

Joanne, 42, and husband Alton, 45, live in a lakefront house across from their 70 acres, what remains of his family’s former dairy farm.

Her 29 taupe and white goats, many of whom she bred, give good milk (about 4 quarts each daily), she’s convinced, because they’re not stressed out like goats in a big herd -- and they have personal contact. To bond, she bottle-feeds the babies. Her philosophy: “We’re all one herd,” goats and humans.

Lakes End Cheese, 212 W. Shore Road, Alburg; (802) 796-3730, www.lakesendcheeses.com.

Star Hill Dairy

Some Vermont cheese makers backed into the business to keep family farms solvent in the face of falling milk prices and disappearing dairy farms. But David Muller, 54, a cheese fancier and founder of a company that developed laser eye surgery equipment, was “in between businesses” when he hit upon the idea of making water buffalo mozzarella on his 275-acre farm in South Woodstock.

During my visit, Muller walked me to the barn where, leaning over the rail, he said, “C’mon, girls. Come on over and say hi.” Three or four water buffalo ambled over to have their bristly heads rubbed. “They’ll come if you call their name,” he said.

Muller’s water buffalo are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, so Vermont winters were a concern. But when he learned that water buffalo were thriving in Montana, his fears were allayed. His first herd, 70 pregnant females and two males, arrived in May 2002 from Florida and Arkansas. But the barn was not finished when December brought 10 inches of snow. He told his herd, “ ‘Just hang in there.’ And they did OK. They grew long hair and hid under the trees.” Muller now has a herd of about 200, with 30 more on the way.

Woodstock Water Buffalo Mozzarella was on the market in New York and Boston as of several weeks ago (and Muller hopes soon to have a Southern California outlet), and a rich yogurt (in seven flavors) debuted in April. Now he’s talking about making creme fraiche, ricotta, butter and a dip.

Star Hill Dairy, 2749-01 Church Hill Road, South Woodstock; (802) 457-4540, www.starhilldairy.com.

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Big cheeses

in a small way

Forget maple syrup. In Vermont, cheese is a major slice of the billion-dollar dairy industry. And dairies such as David and Cindy Major’s Vermont Shepherd in Putney, left, welcome visitors to see how they make farmstead cheeses.