Driving Vermont's Very Tasty Cheese Trail

Driving Vermont's Very Tasty Cheese Trail

 

The network of artisanal local cheesemakers is a delicious—and scenic—excuse for a New England road trip

 

By Rebecca Flint Marx in the Wall Street Journal

 

I'D BEEN DRIVING for hours through southwest Vermont, steering my rental car up and down idyllic, tree-lined country roads that less resembled a transportation system than an unraveled ball of yarn. An atlas and a state map lay discarded on the passenger seat. Neither showed my destination, a farm somewhere along the flank of Vermont Route 30. A lot of farms lie along that road. I had no idea what would distinguish this one from the others.

Then, finally, I saw it: "Cheese."

The words were painted on the side of a red barn, with a big white arrow pointing to an open door. I pulled into the dirt driveway, ecstatic. I had found Southwind Farm, a sixth-generation family dairy operation in North Rupert that produces a Swiss raclette-style cheese from the raw milk of its grass-fed Holsteins.

In the barn I found a room decorated with award certificates and photos of the farm's owners, Jeremy and Jennie Russo. There was also a guest book in which someone had written, "Sorry about the thieves, you guys!" I looked in the self-serve refrigerator; it was empty.

It wasn't the most auspicious start to my journey along the Vermont Cheese Trail, a network of more than 40 farms and factories throughout the state. Although commercial cheese-making in Vermont goes back to 1824, when Crowley Cheese first opened its factory in the Green Mountains, it took the more recent sustainable-food movement and award-winning producers like Consider Bardwell, Grafton Village and Jasper Hill to make outsiders aware of the state's bounty of top-shelf artisanal products. To better promote its curds, the Vermont Cheese Council created the trail, which I spent five days exploring. My pilgrimage encompassed a couple hundred miles, stays at picturesque bed-and-breakfasts and the consumption of an untold number of cheese samples.

I'd come to Vermont plenty of times before to spy autumn leaves, on each occasion fighting with what seemed like half of the East Coast for lodging. Now, following skinny, sun-soaked roads in the heat of August, I was struck by the stillness. At Southwind, I'd seen nobody, save for some shy calves. That was also the case at Consider Bardwell Farm a few miles down the road, where I was the only visitor at the vast, white barn that houses a herd of Oberhasli goats and a small self-serve shop.

Like Southwind, Consider Bardwell operates on an honor system: Pay your money, take your cheese. Unlike Southwind's, its refrigerator was full (and labeled), and I eagerly sampled little cubes of soft, creamy Pawlet, made with raw milk from a neighboring farm's Jersey cows, and Rupert, an aged cow's-milk cheese with a sharp, nutty flavor reminiscent of Gruyère.

Driving around the countryside in search of cheese seems like a happy, simple task. But cheese also functions as a gateway to Vermont's history, beauty, hardships and values.

I saw all of that on full display at Shelburne Farms, the last stop of my first day. The drive there through the Champlain Valley had been magnificent, with plush green hills, bone-white clapboard houses and golden late-summer light. Shelburne is equally spectacular: A 1,400-acre working farm overlooking Lake Champlain, it was built as a model agricultural estate in the late 19th century by a railroad tycoon. Today it operates as a nonprofit center for sustainable agriculture. It also produces full-bodied cheddars from the milk of its Brown Swiss cows. You can watch the cheese being made inside a barn, but the main draw—especially for children—is the farmyard where you can collect eggs, learn how to milk a cow and pet livestock. The whole experience is like some sort of farm-to-table utopia, complete with a gift shop.

That evening I drove up to North Hero, a Lake Champlain island close to the New York border, heading for the homey, 123-year-old North Hero House, a stately but unassuming inn whose rooms are decorated in a country style that's mercifully low on chintz. I watched the setting sun turn the sky the color of a bruised plum; the scene was beautiful enough that its memory softened the frustration I felt the next morning when I learned that the farm I had driven to the area to see had been closed for two years. (A tourism office revealed this fact after I'd been driving around haplessly for an hour.)

If a cheese trail can be said to have a dark underbelly, it is the occasional defunct farm. That, and the many hours spent driving on country roads whose loveliness is frequently undermined by construction—and the accompanying traffic snarls. I ended up cutting a few farms out of my itinerary and focused on the places I most wanted to see.

One of them was Cabot Creamery, where a factory tour taught me all about the cooperative's 95-year-old history, which began when a group of dairy farmers decided to turn their excess milk into butter and market it throughout New England. Today Cabot, which in 1992 merged with Agri-Mark, another co-op, includes more than 1,500 family farms.

Another favorite was Fat Toad Farm, a tiny, family-run goat dairy in a cheerful red farmhouse situated at the end of a road so obscure it defies the powers of GPS. Fat Toad produces cajeta, a traditional Mexican caramel, from goat's milk and sugar. Hannah Reid, whose parents started the business with one French Alpine goat in their garage, said her family makes 60,000 jars of caramel every year in six large copper pots. "We have total control of the quality from start to finish," she said as she led me to the field where the Reids keep their herd of Alpine and Saanen goats. They were friendly, inquisitive creatures, like big dogs with udders.

My final evening on the trail was, in many ways, the most vivid. I spent the night at Liberty Hill Farm & Inn, a dairy outfit on the outskirts of the central town of Rochester. Owned by Beth and Bob Kennett, Liberty Hill has been around since 1780; the milk from its Holsteins goes to the Cabot factory.

Guests can help with farm chores, or just wander the grounds and enjoy Ms. Kennett's superb, bountiful cooking, which at dinner included chicken pot pie, biscuits, garden vegetables, peach crumble and homemade raspberry ice cream. Breakfast the next morning featured a platoon of muffins, a featherweight frittata, links of locally-cured sausage and baked oatmeal served with Cabot's Greek-style yogurt. Even a single night's stay at Liberty Hill provides a window on the amount of work that goes into dairy farming: the predawn milking, maintenance of the facilities and 24/7 care of the animals. Ms. Kennett told me that, during Hurricane Irene, Liberty Hill was underwater, and many cows would have drowned if her sons hadn't led them through the deluge to higher ground.

Today, the farm is verdant and bucolic, and my stay there felt like a fitting end to the journey. I set out for New York the next day, stopping in Londonderry to add Taylor Farm's raw cow's-milk Gouda to the pile in my back seat. Autumn leaves may get all the glory but cheese will truly leave you hungry for more.

IF YOU'RE LOOKING for a more hands-on experience, consider signing up for one of the cheesemaking classes taught by Larry and Linda Faillace. The owners of Three Shepherds Cheese in Warren, Vt., offer courses year-round, ranging from one-day introductory classes to three-day odysseys that incorporate cheese history, politics, biology and biochemistry, as well as explorations of raw milk and the aging and ripening process.

In addition to being informative, the classes (limited to 10 students) are fun. During a three-day course I took last spring at the Round Barn Inn in Waitsfield, Vt., we learned to make Gouda, feta, mozzarella, ricotta and farmer's cheese. Each morning, we gathered in the hotel's kitchen, where the Faillaces guided us through the process, from measuring the rennet (a coagulating enzyme) to separating the whey to pressing the curds into cheese molds. Languorous lunches doubled as cheese-and-wine pairing tutorials. From $195 for a one-day class, threeshepherdscheese.com

—R.F.M.