#JASPER HILL WINNIMERE TRIAL#

The concrete underground vaults are tucked into a hillside, stretching off like spokes on a wheel from the main office building and loading dock. He walks his visitor through some of the seven different “caves” in the complex, each with its own humidity and temperature controlled by a sophisticated environmental system. “It’s a little bit of a rabbit hole,” he says of the chemistry involved. They all work together-or at cross purposes. On one side is the cheesemaker’s art and intuition, on the other is science, all the chemical and biological processes that come from a potent mix of molds and enzymes, yeasts, fungus and bacteria. It is a process fraught with risk and opportunity. It is hard to overemphasize the complexity of what happens to cheese as it ages and the importance of aging, which experts say gives cheese as much as 50% of its taste. “We don’t have 500 years to figure this out,” he says, explaining he’s on a 20-year timeline to decipher and understand the ripening process and make the facility pay.

#JASPER HILL WINNIMERE TRIAL#

In Europe, fine local and regional cheeses have been developed through the accumulated wisdom of decades, even centuries, of careful trial and error in the aging process. While the prizes are a validation of the cheese cave idea and affirmation of the skills of Jasper Hill’s 35 employees, Mateo is ever mindful of how much more there is to do and learn as an affineur. “They did not see us coming,” says Mateo with a smile.

Two cheeses aged at the cellar also took awards: Cabot’s clothbound cheddar won first place in its class and Landaff, a farmstead cheese from Landaff, N.H., won a second. The Kehlers’ Willoughby, a washed rind cheese (also the name of a Northeast Kingdom Lake) took first in its class, and Harbison, a soft ripened cheese made by the Kehlers, took a third place.

Jaspar Hill’s Winnimere, a mountain cheese aged for 60 days, won Best of Show this August at the 2013 American Cheese Society competition in Madison Wis., beating 257 other companies and well over 1,000 cheeses. Three years into their grand experiment in affinage – the French term for ripening or aging cheese – Mateo Kehler is enthusiastic about how far they’ve come and the successes the Cellars at Jasper Hill have achieved. It is super sharp yet not bitter, crumbly but not dry, all you could expect.

He offers a sample of the top-line cheddar – each wheel is worth around $850 or more retail. Another comes when he bends down with a special coring tool that he pushes into a wheel kept for tasting. It’s just one sign that Kehler is the big cheese here. How many 35-pound wheels of Cabot’s finest, racked 14-feet high for 10 to 14 months, are in the vaults? Kehler doesn’t pause to think: 5,860, he says. That’s a healthy sign, says Kehler, because ammonia is a natural byproduct of the ripening process. Their color is dusky mottled light brown, and the aroma in the vault is not cheesy but an unexpected and almost overpoweringly odor of ammonia. We are standing amidst towering racks of special Cabot clothbound cheddar, thousands of wheels stacked on fir planks rising to the ceiling. But not to Mateo Kehler, who already sees a sunny future in the 22,000-square-foot cheese ripening cellars that he and his brother finished building three years ago at Jasper Hill high above Caspian Lake. It’s an odd place to carry out a bright vision, in a 30-foot high domed concrete vault buried under as much as 12 feet of rock and dirt. In the 15 years since, they have also spent a small fortune expanding their operation and reinventing the whole cheese-making process. So in 1998, the two linked their fortunes to making cheese from Ayrshire cows. They eventually looked to the dairy farms that dotted this northern landscape as a way to make a living and hew close to their roots on the 200-acre farm near where they spent summer childhood vacations. He’s Mateo Kehler, one half of the dynamic duo (the other is his brother Andy) who founded Jasper Hill Farms in Greensboro after a career search that meandered from beer making to tofu. (Photo by Andrew Nemethy)He’s also a not-so-mad scientist in charge of a remarkable experiment, not to mention probably Vermont’s most unusual workplace. Wheels of clothbound Cabot cheddar are stacked nearly to the ceiling of a massive concrete aging cellar at Jasper Hill Farms, where science and the cheesemaker’s art are being innovatively combined to create award-winning cheeses.

Jasper hill winnimere