Chewing the Butterfat

We were crowded around a table in Vermont, a gaggle of cheesemongers abuzz with equal portions of obsession, passion, and dairy-fueled madness. All of us had finished within the top three places of a remarkable competition in the previous year, and as a reward were on a winners' tour of the Vermont Cheesemakers Festival and several of the State's most notable cheesemakers and affineurs. In this hotel living room, in the middle of Greensboro which is roughly between Over Yonder and Absolutely Nowhere, the group of us spent a few of our last hours together on the trip drunk on Hill Farmstead Brewery's finest bottles, floating around on The Green Mountain State's heady vapors, and gorging on the beautiful, dripping beast in the middle of the table. There it was, in all its splendor: a pornographically ripe wheel of Jasper Hill Farm's rarest prize: Winnimere. A seasonal specialty, its molten innards were barely held together by a stern girdle of spruce cambium, threatening imminent overflow. Its washed rind reeked forth what smelled like a mildewy hayloft, raw milk from Ayrshire cows yielding flavours of mustard and fir trees mingling with a distinct note of what can only be described as smoked bacon fat the morning after a particularly vigorous one-night stand. And strewn about, available for the sole enterprise of dipping into this banya of unspeakably delicious goo, were bags of the pro cheesemongers' deepest, darkest, filthiest secret: sour cream and onion potato crisps. Amid the low mountains and deep valleys of the Northeast Kingdom, the raunchiest nectar of the gods could be sampled somewhere between a swig of wild beer, a smoke, a Pringles can, a surgically peeled-off rind, and fingers that had to be thoroughly licked lest anything go to waste. Much can be and has been written about artisanal cheeses themselves. I've done my share of that, and I'll keep on doing so. These stories must be told, and they're what get turophiles like myself out of bed in the morning. But what keeps me awake? The camaraderie. The "cheesefam," we like to say. Those amazing, dedicated, passionate, and frequently weird odds and ends; cheesemakers, cheesemongers, dairy scientists, farmers, and everyone in-between; working and learning and coming together because of one thing: our unbridled, instinctive, necessary love of cheese. Thousands of years separated the first lactose-intolerant herders and their rudimentary strained mountain goat yogurts from those of us crowded around the crumb and butterfat-smeared table in the outskirts of rural isolation, yet here we were undoubtedly enjoying the a similar experience across eons. Eyes rolled to the heavens, lips smacking against dribbling ooze, blissful moans everywhere.

Cheesemongers at play in the fields of Vermont.