In a Land of Leaves, Seeking Cheese

By WENDY KNIGHT

THE cheese cave on the Major Farm near Putney, Vt., smells of earth and mold, with a faint nutty aroma. Dozens of wheels of sheep's milk cheese, each 10 inches in diameter, are lined neatly on shelves handmade from the farm's own ash trees. Their colors vary; molds adhere to the rinds, shading them in progressively darker hues over four months or so until, on a fully aged wheel, they take on the gray-taupe hue of a rustic French bread crust. The cave is cool, damp and peaceful.

Outside, in the clear days of fall, tourists roll noisily over the rural Vermont roads in the annual procession of leaf peeping, searching for the brightest golds, mustards and clarets. They stop to take pictures, to buy antiques and maple candy in village shops, to load up on apples and pumpkins at the farm stands. And, increasingly, they stop for cheese.

Artisanal cheese, handmade in small batches, is a growth industry in Vermont, with 35 cheesemakers sprinkled across the state and producing roughly 17 million pounds of specialty cheese - artisanal, farmhouse, organic - a year. Nearly half of them welcome visitors, and there is a meandering Vermont Cheese Trail, inspired by the long-established success of wine trails and, lately, their marketing offspring, from the Malt Whisky Trail in Scotland to the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail connecting courses in Alabama.

Vermont's artisanal makers thrive on the growing sophistication of the American palate. "We've seen a much greater supply of artisanal cheeses from the U.S. in the past few years," said Vicki Wells, the executive pastry chef at Bar Americain, Bolo and Mesa Grill in New York. "I'm excited about them and the public is excited about them."

Artisanal does not have to mean small. The Cabot Creamery Cooperative, the state's largest artisan cheesemaker, produces 14 million pounds annually. Ms. Wells, who uses cheeses from around the globe, is particularly fond of Cabot's aged cloth-bound Cheddar, which she uses in Bar Americain's Vermont Cheddar scones. "It's the best Cheddar I've ever tasted," she said.

CABOT received 100,000 visitors to its two retail shops last year, in Cabot and Waterbury, up from 30,000 a decade ago. Not surprisingly, a large percentage of them came during prime leaf-peeping season. Nearly 25 percent of Cabot's sales occur in the four to six weeks between mid-September and the end of October, said Jed David, the company's director of marketing.

Major Farm, by contrast, is a small operation, selling 20,000 pounds a year. Its raw-sheep's-milk cheese, produced on 250 hilly acres in southeastern Vermont, is firm, with a smooth texture and an earthy taste. Called Vermont Shepherd, it wins accolades from cheese aficionados. But David Major, 44, who owns the farm with his wife, Cynthia, said success wasn't achieved overnight.

In the late 1980's, Ms. Major's father, who owned a milk-processing company in Queens, suggested that they milk sheep. "We made lousy cheese for a few years," Mr. Major recalled with a laugh. Then, in 1993, the Majors went to the Pyrenees to learn about cheese from French farmers.

"I learned that every location, every farm, every animal produces a distinct set of flavors in the cheese," Mr. Major said, "and if you're careful, you can capture that set of flavors in your product." Six months after their return, Vermont Shepherd was named Best Farmhouse Cheese by the American Cheese Society. (Farmhouse cheese is made with milk generated by a single farm's animals.)

On a warm September day, Mr. Major, wearing Carhartt shorts and a faded black T-shirt, traded his usual black Converse sneakers for rubber boots before entering the cheese cave. He had been up at dawn, milking sheep by 5:30 a.m. Usually he is busy with chores until evening, with the help of his cousin Lucy Georgeff and two other full-time workers. (His wife takes care of paperwork and marketing.) On Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings from April through November, he makes cheese, which one can buy at the Majors' small farmstand at the driveway entrance to the property. The stand is self-serve and is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily all year. A chalkboard often lets patrons know where they can look to see sheep grazing nearby. On open house days a few times in late summer and fall, outsiders can go deeper into the farm, touring the small cheesemaking house and the cheese cave.

About 15 miles north of Major Farm, the Grafton Village Cheese Company invites visitors to picnic on its lawn, next to a covered bridge in Grafton. Nearby are a steepled white church and restored 19th-century houses. The cheese factory is sizable, with 18 full-time cheesemakers producing one million pounds each year. But Grafton makes its cheese essentially as it has since 1892: slowly and meticulously by hand, using only milk from Jersey cows. The specialty is aged Cheddar. "We've taken a slow process and slowed it down even more," said Peter Mohn, a vice president at the company.

Visitors can watch the twice-daily cheesemaking through a large glass window in a viewing area adjacent to the company's retail store. A videotape of the whole process plays from a monitor in the corner, and articles about the company line the wall. In the store, cheese lovers can sample and purchase the cheese and other Vermont products.

One fall morning, Scott Fletcher, who has overseen cheese-making operations at Grafton for the last 38 years, was making sage Cheddar with two young cheesemakers. They lifted 50-pound slabs of curd to put them through a harp, a large cheesemaking tool made of stainless steel and monofilament that dices the slabs into cubes. The cubes were then salted and tossed into a 1,500-gallon vat with hand-rubbed Dalmatian sage. Mr. Fletcher reached into the vat and slowly turned the curds by hand, surveying the bounty before it was pressed into rounds and cured in a cooler.

Not surprisingly, Grafton Cheddar is a star ingredient on the menu at the nearby Old Tavern, built in 1801. Its silky Vermont Cheddar bisque is sublime, and the cheese also appears in the onion soup, omelets and mashed potatoes.

Still farther northwest, at the Taylor Farm in Londonderry, the specialty is Gouda; the farm's Maple Smoked Gouda took first place this year in the smoked cheeses/cow's milk category in American Cheese Society competition. Visitors are welcome on the farm anytime during the year. At cheesemaking time in the morning, they can watch the process through a large window.

Milk from the 5 a.m. milking of the farm's cows is pumped directly into a 465-gallon vat and mixed with the milk from the previous day. The milk is warmed to 92 degrees, and the cheesemakers add starter culture and rennet, an enzyme that coagulates the milk, transforming it to a firm, yogurtlike consistency. With one person on each side of the vat, the cheesemakers use harps to sweep through the curd, slicing it into cubes. Whey, a watery liquid, floats to the top to be drained off.

After the curd is formed into one-to-10-pound wheels, given a rest and placed in saltwater for 48 hours, it dries in a cooler for two weeks and then is aged for two months. The last step is shipping to specialty food stores and cheese shops.

Jon Wright, who owns the business with his wife, Kate, said the couple got into cheesemaking "out of desperation," after a precipitous drop in milk prices in the 1990's. Although many small farmers in Vermont were driven out of business as their sales failed to equal their costs, the Wrights were among a few who gave up selling milk and turned to cheese. "Cheesemaking is a means of preserving the working landscape and the farming lifestyle," Mr. Wright said. Last year, the farm sold 60,000 pounds of cheese, double the amount it sold in 1999.

On a September Saturday, after an impromptu tour of the barn with Pepper, the farm's pet sheep, Mr. Wright was manning the cash register at the farm's retail store, which draws about 4,000 visitors a year and generates at least $30,000 in sales. "What is that?" a customer asked, pointing to samples of cream-colored Gouda dotted with tiny green flakes that look like parsley.

"I was hoping you'd ask," Mr. Wright responded, and launched into a discussion about the traditional flavored Gouda, one of his favorites, made with nettle, a plant in the thistle family found in abundance on the farm.

Beyond the Wrights' southern pastures, the mixed hardwood forest was already showing a tinge of yellow. The freshly mowed hayfield smelled sweet. Waving his arm toward the field, Mr. Wright declared: "This is what makes good cheese."

For fall travelers on the road, it makes for good touring, too.