Last weekend Wisconsin cheese makers swept the awards categories at the annual American Cheese Society competition in Portland, Oregon, taking home 70 prizes, including 16 blue ribbons in such fields as “blue-mold cheeses made from cow’s milk” and “cheddars aged longer than 49 months.” Wisconsin’s dominance shouldn’t come as a surprise–they’re not called cheeseheads for nothing. But as western states like California, which produced 2 billion pounds of cheese last year, give Wisconsin, with 2.4 billion, a run for its money, some in the Badger State are turning their attention to artisanal and specialty cheeses–which may have more in common with a Willamette Valley pinot noir than a Kraft Single. “Cheese is a living thing,” says Gaylon Emerzian, one of the producers of the new video Living on the Wedge: Wisconsin’s Artisan Cheesemakers. “It’s like wine, complete with terroir and vintages.”
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Emerzian, an Evanston-based producer who also runs the kids’ cooking Web site spatulatta.com, got a crash course in cheese when she helped Mari Coyne, the farm forager for the city’s farmers’ markets (profiled earlier this year in the Reader), produce the hour-long video. Friends for several years, they’d been tossing around ideas for a farm-related film project since 2003, when Coyne returned to the States after nine months working on organic farms in France. There she’d done everything from mill grain to castrate sheep, but she and Emerzian hadn’t settled on a topic until Coyne went to the tiny Lincoln Square shop the Cheese Stands Alone searching for a cheese to use in a segment on picnics she was putting together for Vince Gerasole’s Channel Two spot “Table for 2.” Matt Parker, one of the shop’s owners, gave her a taste of an organic, washed-rind, Muenster-style round from Willi Lehner’s solar- and wind-powered Bleu Mont Dairy in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, but when Coyne wanted to put it on the show Parker balked. “He said, ‘You can’t! He’s a really small producer, and this is all I have!’” she says. Coyne settled on another cheese, but her interest was piqued, so Parker hooked her up with Suzanne Pingree, a Madison communications professor who happened to have been Coyne’s adviser when she was an undergrad studying agricultural journalism. In addition to her academic work Pingree runs the Web site cheeseforager.com, a clearinghouse for information on Wisconsin-made artisanal cheeses, and works with Wisconsin’s Dairy Business Innovation Center to spread the local-cheese gospel. “I called Gaylon,” says Coyne, “and said, ‘Hey, I think we’ve got our story!’”
There are 1,225 licensed cheese makers in Wisconsin, more than any other state. Coyne visits with just six of them, but they cover a lot of ground, from cheddar and mozzarella to blue cheese and chevre. Again and again her subjects return to the importance of terroir–the idea, appropriated from viticulture, that place is the determining factor in a cheese’s identity. The limestone-rich land and wild biodiversity that are Wisconsin’s glacial legacy impart a particular character to the diet of the pasture-grazed animals that produce the milk that creates the cheese–giving it, in the words of Pleasant Ridge cheese maker Mike Gingrich, a “rich, varied, more complex flavor profile” that changes from pasture to pasture and season to season.
