A few weeks ago, after spending the morning with the cheesemakers at Von Trapp Farmstead, I got back on the road and drove towards Greensboro, VT, home to one of America’s more unusual experiments in cheese, the Cellars At Jasper Hill. Much more than just cheesemakers, the Cellars, launched by brothers Mateo and Andy Kehler in 2008, have taken on an ambitious goal: to bring the European affinage model of cheese aging and distribution to Vermont, bringing together Vermont cheesemakers large and small in one facility and creating a sustainable economic vehicle for small Vermont dairies in the process. The Kehler’s motto, “A Taste Of Place”, captures their aspiration to create a new, distinctly American version of terroir.

(Check out more photos from my visit)

Whereas most cheesemakers both make and age their own cheeses, in the affinage model this process is divided between the maker — who takes the cheese from milk to wheel — and the affineur — who receives the young wheels and then ages them to completion in specialized facilities. This is a well established economic and distribution model in France in particular, and Maitre Fromagers like Hervé Mons in the Loire region of France (Mons has consulted with the Cellars), Rolf Beeler in the Aargau Canton of Switzerland, and Neal’s Yard Dairy in London are some of the big names; facilities are sometimes located in repurposed train tunnels, abandoned mines and decommissioned armories, taking advantage of their underground locations for naturally even temperatures and humidity (Brooklyn is even getting its first affinage tunnels, at Crown Finish Caves in Crown Heights).

Greensboro is located in the Northeast Kingdom, at the very top of Vermont and only a short drive from the Canadian border. While lacking in unused train tunnels, it does have rolling hills, so the Kehler brothers went with the most logical option for creating their complex; dynamite. The Cellars were carved into the hillside near Jasper Hill Farm one blast at a time; by the time they were completed, they had an underground, temperature stabilized, multi-million dollar facility that was closely modeled on the best affinage operations in Europe, and is still one of a kind in the US.

My guide for the day was Adam Smith, Quality Control Manager. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s a former cheesemonger at Cowgirl Creamery in Washington, D.C., and was the big winner at the 2012 Cheesemonger Invitational, before going to work at the Cellars. As with Molly at Von Trapp, we had met while taking cheesemaking courses at VIAC. His job involves having his fingers a little bit everywhere, from the vaults to the make room to the labs, an aspect of his role he prizes.  

The Cellars have seven tunnels, radiating out from a central axis (the administrative offices, packing/distribution, etc are at the “axle”) and occupying 22,000 square feet. Each vault is customized for the cheese styles aging there, featuring different air exchange and humidity control systems and settings. Outside of Vault 5, a digital display on the wall shows a glowing map of the complex, allowing single-point access to the ongoing conditions within all of the vaults. 

The vaulted shape of the ceilings in the tunnels is not just an aesthetic choice. By arcing evenly from the apex down to the walls, moisture that collects on the ceiling tends to run along the curve to the floor, rather than building up in spots and eventually forming drips that could fall on the cheese, which can damage the rind and allow for contamination. Dew point is a constant challenge for these affineurs: You want moisture as high as possible, but without water precipitating out of the air. 

Our first stop on the tour was the Soft-Ripened vault. This is where the white-molded and soft-ripened cheeses like Weybridge and Harbison spend their days, in cool, humid conditions ideally suited to giving them their white, velvety rinds and creamy, soft pastes. In the Washed Rind vault, ACS Best In Show winner Winnimere aged alongside the pillowy Willoughby’s, the barnyardy, meaty pungency of these amber and rosy-rinded wheels pervading the air. Some of their cheeses, such as the Winnimere — made with raw milk and aged over 60 days, unusual for a soft-ripened cheese — present special challenges and thus environmental control is vital. 

In the Cheddar Vault, wheels of the Cabot Clothbound Cheddar rose to the ceiling, a gamey, woody smell filling the air. These cheeses are made at Cabot’s industrial facilities, in batches designated for the Cellars, and trucked over when young. The wheels are wrapped in cheesecloth, rubbed down with lard and propped on shims to allow air circulation around the wheels. They need to be flipped and rotated regularly, and this is no small task, as the wheels are sizable at 35Lbs+ each (it’s no coincidence that the guy in charge of the cheddar vault looks like he could benchpress an Ayrshire).

One of the vaults was dedicated entirely to Alpha Tolman, their newest creation, a cooked, pressed Alpine cheese with a pungent, lightly washed orangey-brown and speckled rind. This cheese is actually made at their satellite production facility in the Food Venture Center in Hardwick, a food business incubator that offers production facilities to small and part-time producers. The Cellars act as an anchor tenant, but many of the producers using it are micro-startups just getting off the ground. 

In the blue cheese vault, the Bayley Hazen’s aged alongside non-blues like Landaff: The growth of blue mold on these cheeses is not detrimental, as it can be brushed off, and indeed can contribute to a more complex rind flavor and aroma development. Adam used a cheese iron to extract a sample from the Bayley, selecting a wheel from a batch that had scored well in staff tastings. And I could see why: the texture was exceptionally buttery and creamy, the flavors well balanced between sweet and salty, with vegetal, peppery and caramel notes. The wheels of Bayley are hand-pierced, with a single needle, one wheel at a time (the way we pierced the blues at Woodcock), rather than utilizing mechanical piercers. 

In this vault I could see firsthand the meticulous data collection that the Cellar practices: Every batch of Bayley had a make sheet attached to it, capturing every step of the fabrication, including the usual data points (pH, TA, time of culturing and renneting), as well as detailed notes from the cheesemakers on the inevitable curveballs of each make. In one they might note that the pH had dropped lower than expected before salting, while in another the flocculation time might have been unusually long. By collecting all of this data (and it all gets digitized eventually), the Cellars have at their fingers a wealth of information to mine at any time, providing an exploded view of any cheese over weeks, months or years, through seasonal variations. The Cellars also have an in-house lab, where everything from moisture to fat can be tested and rind cultures isolated. As Mateo told me at an event at Food Matters Again late last year, they’ve set as an ambitious goal the eventual “culture independence” of the Cellars, meaning that they would be isolating and growing all of their own cultures on-site, rather than relying on purchased cultures. Indeed, Harvard microbiologists Dr Rachel Dutton and Dr Ben Wolfe (previously posted about here) have worked closely with the Cellars, studying the microbiomes of the cheeses and identifying the organisms — particularly the native “volunteers” and local versions of imported cultures — that have found their way onto the wheels. 

In one vault — as we surveilled the wheels rising towards the ceiling — every 30 seconds or so, with a gentle hiss, a cloud of ultra-atomized mist would spray out of a wall-mounted unit and drift out over our heads. Adam jokingly described the Cellar’s staff as “mold farmers”, and that was apt. But what I was reminded of more than anything was a botanical garden, each room its own unique man-made ecosystem. In the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens it might be the southwest desert room and the subtropical rainforest wing; at the Cellars, it’s the bloomy rind vault vs the alpine vault; temperature, humidity and air flow perfectly calibrated to the needs of the organisms upon whom the cheesemakers depend for their alchemical ability to transform milk into cheese gold. 

Unwelcome molds, yeasts and bacterias, and cross contamination between cheeses, are an everyday headache for all cheesemakers, and the Cellars are no exception. As Adam told me, when certain molds started showing up where they weren’t wanted, they were able to tweak things like oxygen levels, airflow, humidity and temperature by small increments, to create an environment that was less welcoming to those molds while being beneficial for the desired cultures. Sure enough, the invasion receded, and without having to resort to aggressive solutions like sanitizing the entire space, or time-consuming ones, like hand-wiping individual wheels to remove the spots of unwanted growth (a task I’ve done more times than I can count in my own modest cheesemaking ventures).

Of course, larger, industrial cheesemakers have all of these tools at their disposal, but what makes the affinage model such an interesting one is that it offers this level of control for the production of relatively small-scale cheesemaking. While the total output carrying the Cellars label is significant and growing, at around $8 million annually, any one of their individual producers — Von Trapp, Landaff, Scholten Family Farm — could never, on their own, afford these kinds of next-level facilities. It also allows the cheesemakers a laser focus on one task: making the cheese, while the affineurs concern themselves with ripening, rind development, environmental control, and all of the other intricacies and challenges of cheese aging.

This is not to say that the producers and affineurs work in isolation from one another. Quite the contrary: a constant dialogue is underway between farmers, cheesemakers and affineurs, discussing everything from feed for the animals to drainage in the molds to target pH when the wheels arrive for aging; and then there are tastings, tastings and more tastings, in a constant process of refinement and optimization. This can be a delicate dance for affineur and cheesemaker alike; as Adam told me, they want to enable the production of the best cheese possible but without dictating recipes and processes. The cheesemakers bring their wheels to the table, and the Cellars provide the facilities to perfect the final product. And not all of the cheese from the cheesemakers goes to the Cellars. Von Trapp, for example, has four cheeses: one of them, the Oma, bears the Cellars sticker. The Savage, a new alpine, is aged at the Cellars but sold under the Von Trapp label in an alternate agreement, and the Mt Alice and Mad River Blue are Von Trapp products from start to finish. 

Before the Cellars were carved into the hills, in 2003 Jasper Hill Farm was born as a farm and creamery. Just down the road from the vault complex is the cow barn, with its Bayley Hazen Moon mural (did you know a wheel of Bayley Hazen was lofted into the stratosphere?); the creamery is just next door, in the same farmhouse that Mateo lives in with his family. Considering the scale of their overall facilities, its surprising to see just one vat (plus several plastic tubs for soft-ripened cheesemaking), in a relatively cozy cheese room; a reminder that these farmstead cheeses are still produced at a small scale, by a few cheesemakers, with the milk of Jasper Hill’s herd of 50 or so Ayrshire cows. And this captures the unique aspect of the Cellars; that it is, for the most part, a cooperative of small cheesemakers working together to enable a much larger project (Cabot occupies a role similar to an anchor tenant in this arrangement). Currently there are five producers: Jasper Hill, Cabot Creamery, Von Trapp, Landaff and Scholten Family Farm, but the Kehlers envision a time when there will be more, encompassing a larger geographical footprint in northern Vermont, and when Jasper Hill is itself producing much more cheese on-site. Whether they can mantain the delicate balance between big business and farmstead producers will be a challenge of its own, but it will be fascinating to see this experiment continue.

Note: You can see video of the Cellars, and interviews with Mateo, Herve Mons and others, in the French TV documentary The War of the Stinky Cheeses. 

Formaggio Kitchen’s blog also has a great post from one of their cheesemongers, which is essentially a sensory evaluation of the Cellars.

(Check out more photos from my visit)