Hannah Elliott

Hannah Elliott, Forbes Staff

I cover the fun stuff: Fashion, Cars and Culture

10/15/2009 @ 5:00PM

Secrets Of Great Vermont Cheddar

Some people come for the riot of russet, orange and yellow leaves that flare for a couple of weeks in northern New England. Lots more come to sample and learn about cheddar cheese–a mouthful of crumbly, nutty, grassy tang. The place is Shelburne Farms, 1,400 acres of pasture, gardens and woodland, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, along the shore of Vermont’s Lake Champlain. Besides offering $450-a-night accommodations in a 24-room inn, the farm employs 200 shepherds, dairymen, cheesemakers, woodsmen and gardeners, all of them dedicated to living and passing along what the farm calls a “pasture to palate” ethic. Guests can milk doe-eyed Brown Swiss cows beside a milkmaid who knows the Bessies so well she identifies them by their udders. “It’s about teaching people to become part of the story of their food,” says Peter Bullock, who runs summer camps for kids on the farm. “We tell people, ‘Try this! Doesn’t this feel good? Isn’t this fun?’”

Cheese is a relatively recent part of Shelburne’s history. In 1886 William Seward Webb (a physician turned Wall Street financier) and his wife, Eliza (Lila) Osgood Vanderbilt, commissioned Olmsted and architect Robert Henderson Robertson to construct a working farm that could double as a holiday retreat for high-society friends from New York City. It encompassed 3,800 acres with 400 acres of woodland, a breeding barn for carriage horses, a five-story farm barn, a dairy, a carriage barn and a 110-room Queen Anne Revival-style mansion. Olmsted, already distinguished for designing Manhattan’s Central Park, used islands of hardwoods and slopes of clover to make the place a haven of sustainable land management. But the farm fell into disrepair in the 1930s, eventually risking foreclosure until the Webbs’ great-grandchildren–Alexander and Marshall Webb, who, along with their four siblings, stood to inherit the estate–created a nonprofit educational entity on the farm in 1972. As such, the farm could accept donations and apply for federal grants to rebuild and maintain the estate; it also allowed for tax breaks associated with owning a conservation easement. (Papa Webb willed the barns and the land to the nonprofit in 1984.)

Today Shelburne is an unusual blend of nonprofit and for-profit operations that brought in $8.1 million in revenue last year. Of that, $4.1 million came from for-profit businesses: the inn and restaurant ($2.4 million); cheddar sales ($900,000, most of it mail order); gift shop items ($570,000); and special events like weddings and a Mozart festival ($240,000). The rest comes from various not-for-profit sources: the dairy; contributions, gifts and grants (Vermonters are big givers); summer camps; and adult classes on cheesemaking. The farm’s $4 million endowment, invested mostly in money market funds and U.S. Treasurys, kicked in $160,000 or so last year. Whole Foods has recently ponied up a $100,000 order.

Net income? That’s a fluid concept at a place like this, but note that, excluding endowment income, revenues last year were a break-even proposition.

Cheddar is a big slice (22%) of the $10.7 billion in cheese sold each year in the U.S. Shelburne, of course, is but a drop in the milk pail, so it shoots for distinctiveness: It is one of 24 cheesemakers in Vermont that use only raw milk. (Federal regulators don’t require pasteurization if the cheese ages longer than 60 days.) The beauty of raw-milk cheddar is that it can taste of flowers, clover, chocolate, pecans, loam, herbs, thistle and sweet onion; acolytes of raw cheese say pasteurization kills those flavors, along with healthful bacteria in the milk. The longer you age cheddar, the sharper (i.e., the greater the breakdown of proteins and the greater the “liberation” of amino acids) it is. Shelburne produces six-month, one-year, two-year, three-year, clothbound and smoked cheddar from its herd of 112 pasture-fed Brown Swiss, a breed known for sturdy legs, a sweet disposition and high milk-fat content.

Shelburne’s cheese has a distinctive flavor for the same reason wine does: terroir. Soil in the Lake Champlain river basin is enriched by ancient glaciers, and the mix of clover, alfalfa, bluegrass and fescue grasses gives the milk a special taste, says Samuel C. Dixon, dairy farm manager. Cold winters, lots of moisture and warm, brief summers also apparently help.

The farm’s first cheddar, made in 1980, was “horrendous,” says Marshall Webb, 61, who himself has produced 33 tons of the stuff. “They had to throw it out.” Shelburne’s chief cheesemaker, Nathaniel Bacon, is obsessive about recording pH levels, regulating warming times and adjusting salt content, but science gets him only so far. He learned the rest–patience, creativity and humility–after years of 4 a.m. dates in the milking parlor. “I don’t like the term ‘artisanal’; that sounds too elitist,” he says. “For me this is a craft.”

The craft starts at 7:30 a.m., when 6,000 pounds of milk is poured into a vat and mixed with a bacterial culture that ripens as the cheese ages. Bacon and his colleagues add the enzyme mix rennet (extracted from genetically modified bacteria) and 30 minutes later cut the coagulated milk into quarter-inch cubes, effectively separating curds from whey. After that they monitor acid levels until the whey can be drained into an underground tank for later use as pasture fertilizer.

The curds are shaped into 7-pound slabs that are cheddared (that is, stacked, flipped and restacked) in order to control lactose fermentation, moisture and temperature. After much measuring and deliberation about the best time to act, Bacon and his crew break up the slabs with a shredder, add salt and squeeze the curds into hoops to compress overnight. The next morning they vacuum-seal some of the gleaming 40-pound blocks of cheese and bind the others in white cotton cloths in order to allow a natural rind to form.

The farm could have made Gruyère or raclette. Why cheddar? “It’s not sexy,” concedes Alec Webb, 57. But it is a cheese with a tradition. The name comes from the village of Cheddar in Somerset, England, where it has been made, in some form or another, since the 12th century.

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