photographed by Tim Evans
The 2005 Super Bowl was barely over when the phones began ringing at the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board. For five years, California had been running its ads claiming that “Great Cheese Comes From Happy Cows” and “Happy Cows Come From California.”
The ads had appeared in California and in a few other markets, but it wasn’t until this year’s Super Bowl that those “Happy Cows” made their national debut. In 60 seconds, the bucolic bliss of America’s real dairyland was shattered. Reporters from around the state and across the country began calling our Milk Marketing Board, demanding to know what it was “going to do about the ads,” recalls its chief executive officer, James Robson.
One ad showed a cartoon cow and its offspring, with the youngster saying, “Tell me again, mom, what it was like before you came to California.” Visions of a blizzard danced in the mother cow’s head. “No, it was too awful,” she responded.
Internet bloggers said the ad’s cows sounded like they came from Fargo, North Dakota, not the Badger State, but it didn’t really matter. Robson tried to reassure the callers, he says, explaining that Wisconsin would remain steady as she goes, building the state’s dairy infrastructure, not getting into a pointless advertising war.
“We weren’t going to get into a Bud Light/Miller Lite kind of campaign with California. I have never seen a tit-for-tat campaign work. I told people we were going to focus on the quality tradition of our cheesemaking,” says Robson.
Besides, California was spending more money on happy cow ads than Robson’s entire $27.1 million budget, which had been flat since 1998. His group’s funding comes from an assessment milk producers voted on themselves in 1983 to help increase demand for their product.
But a lot of local callers wanted more. They wanted to declare war on California. Wisconsinites don’t have many sacred cows, but mess with our cheese and you’ve hit something deeply imbedded in our self-image.
Wisconsin’s $20.6 billion-a-year state dairy industry is nearly twice the size of state tourism, more than double the dollar value of Florida’s citrus industry and eight times larger than Idaho’s potato business. The Wisconsin dairy industry also accounts for 174,000 jobs. But mere statistics don’t begin to capture our culture of cheese.
What other state has school athletic teams named “The Cheesemakers,” as we do in Monroe? Can you even imagine a Californian in a cheese hat? A New Yorker driving miles to buy cheese curds so fresh they squeak?
For more than a century, Wisconsin’s very identity has been connected to cheese. Now that may all change. Sometime in the next year or two, or three, a plastic-wrapped package of shredded mozzarella will roll off of an assembly line somewhere in California, and the state of fruits and nuts and the largest milk, ice cream and butter producer in the country will pass Wisconsin in total cheese production, too.
Last year, Wisconsin produced 2.4 billion pounds of cheese, 26.5 percent of all U.S.cheese production. California nipped at our heels with 2 billion. Idaho finished a distant third, just ahead of New York. But with California cheese production growing at a compounded annual rate of 7.5 percent and Wisconsin’s at less than half that, it’s only a matter of time before we get left behind.
Of course, we’ve been here before. Back in 1993, California passed Wisconsin in milk production, and the world didn’t end. Our license plates still say America’s Dairyland, but soon we may need room to insert the word “real” or “quality” to make it clear that all cheeses aren’t created equal.
California might overrun us producing bland Cheddars and mundane mozzarellas – the big commodities – but our cheeses have the taste and complexity that come from almost 170 years of tradition. So what if California is the K-Mart of cheese? We’re the specialty store.
Our cows are real, too, not cartoons. “They must have filmed those ads in Wisconsin because you won’t find two cows in a pasture anywhere in California. They’re all in grassless drylots,” says Ed Jesse, University of Wisconsin-Extension agricultural marketing and policy specialist.
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals agreed. They sued the California Milk Advisory Board for deceptive advertising. The Federal Trade Commission refused to consider the complaint, which said that “contrary to the… ads, the vast majority of California cows do not live easy lives,” and a California judge threw the case out.
Meanwhile, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business called the campaign “top-rate marketing.” It said California’s $33 million-a-year marketing effort helped the state close in on Wisconsin. California cheese production rose from 281 million pounds in 1983 to more than 2 billion this year.
“We have more cows on grass than California will ever have, but we don’t flaunt it – yet,” says Will Hughes, administrator of the “Grow Wisconsin Dairy” program of the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.
Hughes points to the recently created state quarter, which has a cow and cheese on it. “That was symbolic,” he says. “Dairying is going to be an important part of our future.”
But how do we ensure that? How do we beat back the California challenge? The answer begins not with gimmicky ads but with a tradition and culture that is unique to Wisconsin. In our past, we may find the assurance of our future.
Got Cheese?
Dairying was not Wisconsin’s first agricultural love. It was wheat, an easy, no-hassle, plant-it-and-forget-it crop until harvest time, and Wisconsin was in the heart of the nation’s bread basket, producing one-sixth of its wheat crop. In Downtown Milwaukee, in the Grain Exchange room, wheat futures traded like, well, wheat futures.
But it turned out that wheat wasn’t so easy after all. It exhausted the soil by depleting the nitrogen, and in time, yields shriveled. A chinch bug invasion devastated what was left, and between 1869 and 1879, the state’s wheat production plummeted by more than half.
Die-hard wheat farmers packed up and headed west. Settlers who stayed tried barley, but this time the market failed. It was Jefferson newspaper editor William Dempster Hoard who began preaching the gospel of dairying as soil-conserving agriculture that was perfect for Wisconsin.
It was an uphill battle, writes Jerry Apps in his book Cheese: The Making of a Wisconsin Tradition, because dairying and cheesemaking were considered women’s work. Wisconsin’s stubborn northern European settlers probably looked at each other and laughed. Who did this newspaper editor think they were? Girlie men?
But Hoard kept at it for 50 years, becoming known as “The Father of American Dairying.” German and Swiss immigrants were easier to sell and embraced dairying as a familiar way to farm. Transplants like Hoard from New York state, then the leading dairy state, had moved to Wisconsin during the 1840s and ’50s and many took up dairying here.
As early as 1837, Charles Rockwell ran a commercial cheesemaking operation near Fort Atkinson. In 1845, a group of Swiss immigrants settled in Green County and began making the aromatic cheeses they’d known back home, such as Limburger, aged Swiss, brick and Cheddar. New York native Chester Hazen established the state’s first true cheese factory near Fond du Lac in 1864, earning the title “Father of the Wisconsin Cheese Industry.” By 1865, Wisconsin had 35 small cheese plants producing half a million pounds of cheese a year.
The introduction of refrigerated freight cars in the 1870s opened up new markets, and Hazen shipped the first carload of Wisconsin cheese to New York. He also won first prize for factory cheese at the International Dairy Fair in New York. But to be competitive, Wisconsin’s cheese and butter had to be of uniform quality, and they weren’t.
Hoard eventually began publishing Hoard’s Dairyman (1885), the nation’s preeminent dairy publication, but even before that, he helped start the Wisconsin Dairyman’s Association in Watertown in 1872 to find solutions to the quality problems. The dairymen eventually convinced the Legislature it was time to create the first “Dairy School” in the country at UW-Madison.
“To a certain extent, the Legislature did then what it did more recently with biotech: It saw the loss of an old industry, wheat farming, and moved to encourage a new one, dairying,” says William Wendorff, chairman of UW-Madison’s food science department. UW’s experimental farm opened in 1883, and by 1889, the Legislature had established the UWCollege of Agriculture.
One year later, the college’s chemist, Stephen Babcock, developed a test to determine the fat content of milk. The device allowed producers to pay farmers according to the cheesemaking value of their milk and avoid overpaying for “watered” milk.
Babcock co-authored a text called Practical Dairying,and in 1891, 70 young men registered for the university’s 12-week “Course in Dairying,” which included classes in cheesemaking methods and management. Thousands more would follow.
The state became a pioneer in the inspection and regulation of food plants beginning in the mid-1890s, further improving quality. Meanwhile, the cheese factory, refrigerated rail car, the university’s expertise and the advent of silos (allowing for winter feeding of cows and continued milk production) all helped complete the Wisconsin dairy revolution.
With cheaper land and labor, Wisconsin was able to compete well with New York farmers and even in the London markets. By 1904, Wisconsin had become “America’s Dairyland.” Between 1909 and 1911, the state’s cheesemakers swept first, second and third place in nearly every category of cheese judged at the Chicago fairs. In 1910, Wisconsin surpassed New York as the country’s leading cheese producer, a title it has held for nearly 100 years.
To further ensure quality, beginning in 1916, Wisconsin became the first – and still the only – state to require cheesemakers to pass an oral exam and become licensed. And since 1994, when the Milk Marketing Board and UW-Madison jointly created the Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker Certification Program, the state has boasted the only Master program outside of Europe.
Wisconsin now has more licensed cheese-makers (1,361) and more Master cheesemakers than any place on Earth. This tradition of quality cheesemaking has become a crucial advantage as California bids to become the Big Cheese.
Us vs. Them
Wisconsin is “the land of cheese,” Jerry Apps confidently proclaimed in his 1998 book on the state’s cheese history. With Wisconsin producing more than 30 percent of U.S.-made cheese, more than two billion pounds a year, California was “a distant second,” producing less than a billion pounds a year.
Wisconsin’s specialty cheese production increased 34 percent that year, and cheese guru Steve Jenkins, author of the definitive guide to the subject, the Cheese Primer, began raving about the quality of the state’s creations. Wisconsin, he said, was home to “serious cheese, eminently more memorable cheeses” that were “making lights go on in people’s heads, cheeses worthy of magnificent wines.”
Jenkins called them “American treasures,” the small-scale production runs of artisans like Anne Topham, who, in the early 1980s, gave up her UW-Madison job to become one of the first to produce artisan goat cheese in the Midwest. Her Fantôme Farm in Ridgeway makes an aged raw-milk goat cheese named boulot that is sold only at the Dane County Farmers’ Market in Madison.
Across the country, the demand for such cheeses soared as a young group of top restaurant chefs embraced regional cooking. Between the chefs, the Food Channel and the increasing popularity of ethnic foods, the public was developing a taste for more complex cheeses.
Per-capita cheese consumption was on its way to hitting a record 30.6 pounds for every man, woman and child in the country by 2003 and is projected to reach 37.5 pounds by 2009.
This was all good news for Wisconsin, but the health of a state’s cheese industry is only as good as its underlying milk supply, and that had become a problem. Wisconsin’s total milk production had crested at 25 billion pounds in 1988. It had increased each of the previous 65 years even as the number of dairy farms plummeted, thanks to improved breeding and nutrition that increased each cow’s production and to larger herds, the average now having grown from 15 cows per farm to 74 in 2004.
But following the 1988 peak, Wisconsin’s milk production fell back, then stagnated, hovering between 22 and 24 billion pounds per year. It was no surprise when California passed Wisconsin in milk production five years later. And between 1988 and 2002, Wisconsin’s share of U.S.cheese production fell 11 percentage points, from about 34 percent to 23 percent.
Between 1985 and 2001, Wisconsin lost nearly a third of its cows. All of the country’s traditional dairy states, including Pennsylvania, Iowa, New York and Minnesota, were losing cows, but none lost as many as Wisconsin did: 584,000, according to a 2002 report by UW-Extension professor Edward Jesse.
Meanwhile, Jesse explains, the states west of the Rocky Mountains gained cows, with California leading the way. In fact, it added nearly as many cows as Wisconsin lost.
In another 2002 report, Jesse calculated that if Wisconsin continues to lose cows at the 1990s rate, our milk production will drop a third by 2015. And Wisconsin cheesemakers already operate at a competitive disadvantage because they can’t get enough milk to run at full capacity, he says.
Already, 16 percent of the milk used to make Wisconsin cheese has to be imported. Short supply means state cheesemakers pay more for milk than their Western competitors, adding an additional 10 to 15 cents to the cost of a pound of cheese.
In the past, increasing cow productivity helped keep supply stable, but now, Jesse wrote, “even very optimistic gains in milk production per cow” won’t offset the declining number of Wisconsin dairy cows.
Nor is there much reason for optimism. The fact is, compared to other states, Wisconsin’s cows finished a miserable 25th in per-cow milk production in 2004. Producing 17,796 pounds of milk per year, the average Wisconsin cow produces 1,000 pounds less than the U.S.weighted average, more than 5,000 pounds behind the state of Washington’s U.S.milk-yield leaders and 3,400 pounds per year per cow behind California’s.
Why are Wisconsin cows such laggards? That California commercial aside, it’s not the cold weather. “Milk production doesn’t drop in the winter,” says WMMB’s Robson. “It goes up.” It’s hot weather that decreases production.
The problem is that too many Wisconsin cows are on “small, inefficient farms,” says Jesse. In 2003, Wisconsin had 16,900 dairy farms. California had 2,400 but had 750 cows per farm compared to just 113 nationally and a meager 74.3 cows per Wisconsin farm.
Production per cow is higher in larger herds. They use more technology. They’re more likely to milk three times a day instead of two and employ crop, herd management, nutrition and breeding experts.
The best Wisconsin cows, like the 600 being milked by the Crave Brothers in Waterloo, produce 30,000 pounds per year per cow, on par with the best producers anywhere. But Wisconsin only has 100 or so herds producing at that level, says Jesse. About 83 percent of Wisconsin’s cows in 2003 were on farms with fewer than 100 cows.
Wisconsin has “too many cows in the hands of old-time farmers who are resisting change and just trying to eek out a few more years before they retire,” says Jesse. A lot of these cows are housed in outdated facilities and aren’t even being tested for percent of fat in their milk. “That’s the biggest obstacle to the health of the cheese industry.”
Beyond these issues are built-in advantages for California: It has a climate that permits 10 alfalfa crops a year instead of three or four and favorable state and county government policies, including capital gains breaks and special incentives for farm and dairy plant investment.
These factors, combined with the lower price paid for California milk, have meant dairy plant investors there can make money and beat our prices for commodity cheeses like Cheddar and mozzarella even when the higher cost of shipping to the East Coast is included.
But it doesn’t really matter if California passes us in cheese production, says Jesse. Taking advantage of our edge in quality is the real issue. “And right now, we have too little milk to maximize the capacity we have to produce damn good cheese,” he notes.
The danger is that the biggest cheese producers could leave the state in search of more and cheaper milk. But Jesse believes Wisconsin has taken the steps needed to head that off. Wisconsin, he says, is already undergoing “a painful transition from a somewhat outdated milking culture with people who think that if you have more than 50 cows, there’s something wrong.”
The Tipping Point
When California passed Wisconsin as the number-one milk producer, Wisconsin’s agricultural leaders finally saw the need for action. State officials invested $150 million in the expansion and addition of cheese production facilities, Marketresearch.com reported.
The Wisconsin Specialty Cheese Institute was born that year; the Wisconsin Master Cheesemakers certification program, the following year. Enrollment was limited to licensed cheesemakers with at least 10 years of experience.
The first class graduated from the three-year program in 1997 and there are now 33 active Masters who have come through the program, with specialties in 27 different cheeses. Each graduate is entitled to use the prestigious Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker’s mark on the cheeses he or she produces in his or her specialty.
There is no other program like it outside of Europe and no more respected sign of a quality cheese in the Western Hemisphere, boasts Milk Marketing Board leader Robson. And no part of the United States has more Master cheesemakers than Wisconsin’s Green County.
It was there, outside of Monroe, that Randy Krahenbuhl, son of a Wisconsin cheesemaker and graduate of the first Master cheesemaker’s class, with certification in both Swiss and Gouda, demonstrated his skill as owner of Prima Käse, a company whose name means “excellent cheese.”
The year after becoming a Master, Krahenbuhl’s Gouda won first place in its category and best of all cow cheeses in the American Cheese Society annual competition, the Academy Awards of artisan cheeses. Celebrity status followed, and Krahenbuhl was soon telling the media about the trouble he had getting enough milk to make his cheese.
By 2003, he was gone to Indiana, recruited by deep-pocketed dairymen who promised him a new cheese plant and all the milk he could use.
It was from there, instead of Wisconsin, that Krahenbuhl won the 2004 gold medal in London for his Gouda, beating the Netherlands’ cheesemakers at their own game. This year, Krahenbuhl returned to Wisconsin to face his old colleagues and capture the U.S.Cheese Championship Contest’s Best of Show award in Milwaukee for his big-wheel Emmentaler Swiss.
Krahenbuhl was not the only one being recruited.
“There’s hardly a cheesemaker in Wisconsin who hasn’t been offered a job in California,” says Robson. Wisconsin’s unique cheese culture is keeping them here, he says.
But Krahenbuhl’s 2002 defection stirred fears. He hasn’t been the only cheesemaker to complain about lagging milk supply.
“We took dairying for granted for a long time in Wisconsin,” admits Will Hughes, and he includes the state Department of Agriculture for which he works. “Part of it was our conservative nature and assuming that if we just kept working hard, everything would be fine. But we reached a tipping point about three years ago where it became a high priority for the governor,” he says. Industry and state leaders are now working to create a renaissance, Hughes notes.
One key leader was a transplanted Texan who arrived in 2001 to head the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board. “I was shocked by the number of people who weren’t aware of the size and contribution dairying makes to the state,” says Robson. “It was as if they’d read all the newspaper stories about farms going out of business and cheese plants closing and thought it was just a matter of time and they’d all be gone.”
Robson also noticed that each time a dairy farmer wanted to expand, neighbors opposed the purchase of additional cows.
Government didn’t help either. “They changed the law so we had to unload milk indoors,” remembers Carr Valley Master cheesemaker Sid Cook. “California doesn’t have to do that, so we had extra costs. I said, ‘Hey, we’re an endangered species. You should help us, not hurt us.’ But back then, the government was more interested in getting rid of cheese factories than helping them.”
Equally troubling was what Robson didn’t find in the state’s grocery stores: Wisconsin cheeses. The state was producing some of the world’s finest cheeses, but Wisconsin groceries were full of products from elsewhere. In 2001, Wisconsin cheeses were treated like California’s wines were 25 years earlier – they weren’t getting the respect they deserved.
Robson hired a staffer to launch the “Wisconsin Initiative” to create a featured cheese of the month in state grocery stores and help Wisconsin cheesemakers sell more cheese. His group also created a tourist map of Wisconsin’s cheese plants, wineries and breweries.
But Robson’s greatest effort went into the Dairy Impact Campaign launched late in 2001 to promote dairying. It pointed out that the industry pumps $35,000 a minute into the state’s economy and provides millions of dollars in tax revenue and tens of thousands of jobs.
Suddenly, it was as if the stars had all aligned. “I don’t want to make it sound like the campaign was the only thing, but it seemed to bring parts of the industry together: dairy farmers, cheesemakers and, to my surprise, Gov. Doyle, who doesn’t have an agricultural background. [He] recognized the importance of dairy and appointed Rod Nilsestuen secretary of agriculture, a guy who grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm. It was like a snowball rolling downhill.”
As it rolled, the business climate for dairying changed. The state began taxing rural land by use for dairy farming and not its potential value for development. A bipartisan effort in the Legislature passed the dairy farm tax credit to encourage modernization in 2003.
Sometime later this year, the state will finalize guidelines for counties and townships to use in regulating dairy expansion. In the past, the DNRand individual municipalities seemed to be constantly adding hoops that farmers had to jump through to build their businesses. Now they’ll have predictable standards.
The $2.5 million Dairy Business Innovation Center was launched with help from Sen. Herb Kohl to aid state cheesemakers in developing new products and selling their wares, and more farmers became interested in developing processing facilities, says Hughes.
“We had six cheese plants in trouble with the DNR,” recalls Dan Carter, the 75-year-old manager of the Dairy Business Innovation Center who has 50 years of experience marketing cheese. But Nilsestuen, the new head of agriculture, reacted very differently than his predecessors. “He got the secretary of the DNR in his car and drove to each plant, and they settled all the problems within two days, instead of going to court.”
For the first time, plants that take the methane gas produced by cow manure and convert it to energy are becoming economically feasible. One farm already produces enough energy for 200 homes.
The doom and gloom that Robson saw when he first arrived has vanished, replaced by a new optimism about dairying in Wisconsin.
Montreal-based Saputo Inc., one of the leading cheese producers in North America, bought Wisconsin’s Frigo Cheese Company in the 1990s and began closing some of its plants. But earlier this year, Saputo bought Wisconsin’s Schneider Cheese Co., a vote of confidence in the future of the state dairy industry, notes Carter.
Just back from an international dairy show in Minneapolis, Carter says, “I have never seen such a positive vibe for Wisconsin dairy. Wisconsin cheese is really being recognized all over the world.”
In 2004, six new cheese plants opened in Wisconsin; 16 were renovated. Seven new ones came online this summer. Since 2003, nine others have expanded.
Since 2001, the size of the average Wisconsin dairy herd has grown by three cows a year, instead of the one-cow-a-year rate that preceded it, and earlier this year, for the first time in 17 years, Wisconsin’s milk production began increasing month after month.
Prominent cheesemakers from Western states and Europe are now talking to state officials about opening operations here. “Wisconsin has become the place to make cheese,” says Hughes.
“When I go out and talk to people now, there’s a new sense of a pride in Wisconsin’s dairy industry,” says Robson. People are saying “cheese,” and they’re smiling.
Quality Over Quantity
Dan Carter sees the future of Wisconsin cheesemaking: “specialty, artisan and farmstead cheeses that take advantage of the state’s tradition of high quality and have a higher profit margin.”
The state is already a leader in higher-profit organic milk production. Wisconsin has more certified organic dairy farms – more than 250 – than any other state.
Even the state’s big-commodity cheese producers are moving into specialty products, a market that’s growing five times faster than commodity cheese consumption.
When Alto Dairy Cooperative had problems competing with lower-priced Western commodity cheeses, Carter paid a visit to the company located a half-hour west of Green Bay. He pointed out that Alto’s commodity Cheddar was already known for high quality. He suggested aging it and selling it as a specialty cheese for 50 cents more per pound.
Later this year, the 600 farmer-owned, 60,000-cow cooperative, which operates the largest cheese plant east of the Mississippi, will do just that. It will introduce its own line of Black Creek Classic Aged Cheddars, while continuing to make its commodity cheeses as well.
Carter also helped Monroe’s Klondike Cheese Co. move away from commodity products to become one of the country’s most advanced feta cheese producers.
The growth in award-winning artisan cheeses in Wisconsin is creating “a halo effect for the rest of the [dairy] industry,” says Hughes. Specialty cheeses have grown from 4 percent of the cheese produced in the state to more than 14 percent in just eight years. Wisconsin now makes 35 percent of all specialty cheese sold in the United States.
“California doesn’t have the history, the old cheesemaking families, the infrastructure, limestone-filtered water and miles of green pastures that we do,” Robson notes. “They don’t have the climatic and geographic capital that make great cheeses.”
Nor is Vermont in the race. Though it has tried to emulate Wisconsin and create a similar infrastructure, its capacity is only a fraction of Wisconsin’s. And New York’s milk supply is increasingly going into liquid use. The only real competition is foreign, and even here Wisconsin can hold its own.
People want more than excellent artisan cheese – they want a story with their cheese, says cheese merchant Ehlers. And there, Wisconsin excels.
There’s old-world cheesemaker Errico Auricchio, who was sent by his Italian employer to start a U.S.operation in 1979. Auricchio spent some time in other states before concluding that “if you want to make movies, you go to California, but if you want to make cheese, you go to Wisconsin.”
He set up shop in tiny Wrightstown, Wisconsin. “At the time,” he says, “there was the perception that good Italian cheese had to be made in Italy. But over the years, Julia Child dropped in to sample and rave about his cheese, and delis started selling more of his sharp provolone than the imported stuff.
In 1995, Auricchio sold his interest in the parent company and created his own company, BelGioioso Inc. The transition was not always easy, building a 270-employee, mid-size cheese company that excels in making both Italian classics and 12 artisan cheeses.
But now, Carter says, “BelGioioso makes more profit per linear foot than any cheese company in the world,” while it continues to produce the old-world flavors. If you go to Boston’s Italian North End, to the oldest Italian grocer there, Polcari’s, you’ll find regular customers stocking up on four and five pounds of BelGioioso cheeses at a time.
In Waterloo, Wisconsin, the Crave Brothers are like the Cartwrights of “Bonanza” TVfame – four men riding herd on a farm with 600 cows in the milking parlor and another 500 ladies-in-waiting frolicking in green pastures. Twenty years ago, each might have had his own farm with 50 cows, but these sons of a Wisconsin dairy farmer pooled their talent and money to create a farmstead that is the first stop when foreign visitors ask state officials to see a model Wisconsin dairy.
George Crave enrolled in UW’s cheesemaking short course, hired two experienced licensed cheesemakers and found someone to help re-engineer equipment from a closed cheese plant. Still, his wife Debbie says, working their way through the myriad state and county paperwork and regulations was daunting.
With a grant from the Dairy Business Innovation Center, Debbie and George traveled to Switzerland and France to study affinage (cave aging) in preparation for constructing their own cellar to age their Les Frères to reliable perfection. “They’re building something for future generations,” says Dan Carter.
As a farmstead cheesemaker using only their own milk, just as an estate-bottled wine would use only one grower’s grapes, the Craves have excelled. In 2004, they won silver medals for both their mascarpone and Les Frères in the World Cheese Championship in London against rivals from Italy and France.
Meanwhile, Dodgeville cheesemaker Michael Gingrich is living what might be a baby boomer’s dream: a second career that’s more creative and closer to nature. A successful former Xerox computer engineer born in California, Gingrich twice left his home state and moved to Wisconsin. Leaving Xerox the second time was the charm.
Gingrich and his wife and another couple started as dairy farmers with 300 acres and 150 cows in 1994, then began a unique style of making cheese. Experts say there is no better cheese than that made from the milk of cows grazed on June grass. Gingrich tried to replicate that by developing a rotational grazing system using 20 separate pastures that give his cows the equivalent of early spring grass and clover for the entire five-month growing season. It’s a far cry from California’s factory-like drylot method of feeding cows.
Gingrich spent three years developing a business plan, working in another cheese plant to become a licensed cheesemaker and studying Beaufort, an unpasteurized French Gruyère made in the Alpine region. He went to the UWCenter for Dairy Research for help in developing a recipe.
In 1999, he made eight small vats of the cheese at UWusing “summer milk,” then aged it in his basement, tasting it every few months. The UWpeople even convened a tasting panel, says Gingrich. In the fall of 2000, the cheese was mature enough to market.
The following year, Uplands Cheese Co.’s Pleasant Ridge Reserve won the American Cheese Society’s Best of Show award, the equivalent of the Olympic Gold Medal in artisan cheesemaking.
In 2003, Pleasant Ridge Reserve was named the U.S.Grand Champion Cheese, making it the first cheese to win both prestigious U.S.competitions. “It really put us on the map,” says Gingrich. Pleasant Ridge did the unprecedented again this year when it won the American Cheese Society’s Best of Show a second time in July. “What the market is telling us,” says Gingrich, “is that the future is in diversity.” And Wisconsin cheesemakers produce some 450 types and varieties, more than twice the number California produces.
Gingrich’s cheese sells out every year, much of it going to fans on the two American coasts. One day, a customer stopped by who’d grown up in Wisconsin, now lived in San Francisco and wanted to see the birthplace of a cheese that so outclassed those in California. “It’s like seeing the Packers come to San Francisco and beat the Giants,” the cheese fan said.
BelGioioso, the Craves and Gingrich have all won awards, but their combined total is just a fraction of those claimed by Wisconsin cheesemaker Sid Cook, owner of Carr Valley Cheese. With 115 years of cheesemaking experience in his family – he got his cheesemaking license before he got his driver’s license – Cook dreamt up his 2004 American Cheese Society Competition Best of Show grand champion Gran Canaria, a cow, goat and sheep milk-blend cheese aged in olive oil, while vacationing in the Canary Islands.
But when Milwaukee hosted the 2005 U.S.Championship Cheese Contest last March, Cook was worried. Knowing California cheesemakers were eager to beat Wisconsin on its own turf and score a marketing coup, Cook entered a few more of his 40-some cheeses than he might have otherwise, and encouraged his colleagues to do the same.
In the end, Indiana defector Krahenbuhl won Best of Show, but Wisconsin dominated the competition, winning over four times more awards in the 33 cows’ milk categories than any other state. Cook never strayed far from the podium as he picked up 20 of Wisconsin’s 55 awards himself, including a second-runner-up in the grand champion round for his semi-soft goat’s milk cheese rubbed with cocoa, Cocoa Cardona.
On September 20, Milwaukee’s gourmet Dream Dance Restaurant will host a special “meet the cheesemaker “ dinner featuring five courses of Carr Valley Cheeses and the Master himself, in a moment reminiscent of traditional winemakers’ dinners.
In fact, Carr talks like a winemaker when he discusses why California will never produce cheese like Wisconsin’s: “In California, the milk is mild and perfect for processed cheese, but it doesn’t age out nice. It has a flat flavor. More of a sulfur taste. It doesn’t have the same fruitiness and complexity of Wisconsin cheese.”
That’s why Carr relies on just 30 small milk producers and doesn’t want to see their herds grow. Carr doesn’t think Wisconsin need worry about upping its milk production and doesn’t fret about those silly talking cows in California’s ads.
“We have small farms that produce milk that when it’s made into cheese, it has amazing flavors,” Carr notes. “I mean, why did people come here to make cheese in the first place? Because Wisconsin is very similar to the best cheesemaking regions in Europe.”
Ultimately, he says, the very ecology of Wisconsin is our prime asset. “The huge advantage we have here is the terroir,” Carr says, with an assurance that may only be possible for a third-generation cheesemaker with 40 years of experience in the business. “The beauty of the area is transmitted into the cheese.”
Cheese Myths:
• Cheddar cheese is orange.
Nope. It depends on where you live. Cheddar is white on the East Coast, white or orange in the Midwest and all orange by the time you get to the West Coast. Food coloring is added to make it orange.
• Cheeseheads wear Cheddar. Or Swiss.
Actually, it’s neither. The orange color looks Cheddar-y, but the shape suggests a giant wedge of Swiss. Historically speaking, Swiss might make sense: Between 1920 and the 1950s, Monroe, Wisconsin, was known as the Swiss Cheese Capital of the World. Nowadays, the state produces more mozzarella and Cheddar. Anyway, the creator of the Foamation Co. cheese hat, Ralph Bruno, couldn’t bear to choose one cheese, so he designed hats to look “like a cheese that doesn’t exist.”
• Most Wisconsin milk is drunk.
Au contraire.An amazing 90 percent actually goes into cheese production. It takes 10 pounds of milk to produce one pound of cheese.
• You can’t make cheese talk.
You can. Sort of. Fresh curds (less than 48 hours old) actually squeak when eaten.
• Limburger is too stinky to sell.
In the 1930s, Wisconsin’s Green County was home to 30 Limburger plants. Talk about smelling our dairy air! But the deceivingly mild-tasting cheese’s pungent odor scared off later generations and sales fell off. Until now. Today, the last American Limburger plant belongs to Chalet Cheese Co-op in Monroe, where Master cheesemaker Myron Olson produces the delicacy that’s making a comeback. Sales have increased almost 40 percent in the past two years.
• Whey is simply a waste product.
Whey wrong. Once a useless byproduct of the cheesemaking process, today whey is a protein source for everything from baby cereals to power bars. It’s now such a moneymaker that some joke they’re actually in the whey business, and cheese is the by-product.
• You can’t use unpasteurized milk.
Another white lie. Unpasteurized milk is primo if you age the cheese for at least 60 days to kill the bad bacteria. That’s according to Steve Ehlers, who, as owner of Larry’s Market in Brown Deer, was a pioneer in selling specialty cheeses. Ehlers, also a member of the American Cheese Society’s board of directors, says that “given the same cheesemaker and same conditions, you always get better cheese from unpasteurized milk because there’s more good bacteria in it.”
1. Upland Cheese’s Pleasant Ridge Reserve 2. Carr Valley’s Cave-aged Cheddar 3. BelGioioso’s Creamy Gorgonzola 4. Crave Brother’s Farmstead Cheese Classics Mascarpone 5. Antigo Cheese’s Stravecchio Parmesan 6. Park Cheese’s Sharp -Provolone 7. Widmer’s Cheese Cellars’ Brick 8. Roth Käse USA Ltd.’s Grand Cru Surchoix Gruyère 9. Hook’s Cheese Company’s Aged Cheddars 10. Edelweiss Town Hall Cheese Co.’s Emmentaler Mary Van de Kamp Nohl is a senior editor of Milwaukee Magazine.
We asked award-winning cheesemakers, cheese sellers and industry insiders to help us pick the Top 10 specialty cheeses produced in the state.
An aged, unpasteurized, washed-rind Beaufort-style cheese inspired by the farmstead cheeses of southeastern France’s Alpine provinces (www.uplands-cheese.com).
Cheesemonger Mark Jezo-Sywulka of Sendik’s in Brookfield says “almost all” of Sid Cook’s cheeses “could be on the Top 10 list.” This
may be his best (www.carrvalleycheese.com).
Italian-born, fourth-generation cheesemaker Errico Auricchio‘s BelGioioso Cheese produces
12 specialty cheeses, including this gem
(www.belgioioso.com).
The James Beard Society’s fussy eaters swoon over this cheese. The secret to its sweetness is the milk from 600 cows the four Crave brothers nurture (www.cravecheese.com).
Jezo-Sywulka says it’s almost identical in flavor to Italy’s famous Red Cow Cheese that costs almost three times more per pound (www.antigocheese.com).
Bon Appetit magazine has for years called this the country’s best provolone (www.parkcheese.com).
Joe Widmer is still using his Swiss grandfather’s bricks to push the whey out of his brick cheese, a Wisconsin original developed in 1875. No other U.S. plant produces smear-ripened, aged, foil-wrapped, tangy brick
(www.widmerscheese.com).
Roth Käsemeans “good cheese” in German, and the company proves you needn’t go to Europe for a great Gruyère. Just head
to Monroe (www.rothkase.com).
Tony and Julie Hook are experts at affinage (cave aging), the process that gives a cheese character and produces the crunchy lactic crystals for which their cheddar is famous (www.cheeseforager.com/hooks.php).
Wonderful old-fashioned “big wheel” Swiss, which many experts say is the most difficult cheese to make (608-938-4094).
