Category: New & Now

We've teamed up with Wisconsin Cheese for an interview mini-series called Meet the Makers, featuring a sampling of the state’s finest cheesemakers and their award-winning creations.

If you grew up in the ‘90s like I did, chances are high that you also watched the charmingly British series of short films featuring Wallace and his clever dog, Gromit. In an installment titled A Grand Day Out, Wallace and Gromit realize they’ve eaten through their cheese stores, so they embark on a quest to find more. Naturally, their journey takes them to the moon—that big, pale yellow orb in the sky with its Swiss cheese-like holes. Spoiler alert: Wallace and Gromit discover that the moon is not, in fact, made of cheese and return home without any additional curds in tow.

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We’ve teamed up with Wisconsin Cheese for an interview mini-series called Meet the Makers, featuring a sampling of the state’s finest cheesemakers and their award-winning creations.

Cheese has been made in Wisconsin since before it was even a state. In the 1830s and 40s, a wave of European immigrants planted roots in the region and started dairy farms, where they made homemade cheeses to get the most out of all that milk. It was a woman in fact, Anne Pickett, who started the first official cheesemaking business in the area, a whole seven years before Wisconsin joined the union in 1848. This time period also saw the creation of now-classic Wisconsin cheeses—namely Brick (we have the folks at Widmer’s Cheese Cellars to thank for this) and Colby. By 1910, the state surpassed New York in milk production, earning it the nickname, “America’s Dairyland.”

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We’ve teamed up with Wisconsin Cheese for an interview mini-series called Meet the Makers, featuring a sampling of the state’s finest cheesemakers and their award-winning creations.

When you grow up in a family that owns a business, there are typically two outcomes when it comes to your future: you either run as far as you can in the other direction and never look back, or you fall in step with the generations that came before you and eventually take the reins. Of course, both paths have merit, especially when there’s delicious food involved.

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We’ve teamed up with Wisconsin Cheese for an interview mini-series called Meet the Makers, featuring a sampling of the state’s finest cheesemakers and their award-winning creations.

In 2019 I was lucky enough to attend the annual American Cheese Society Awards, hosted that year in Richmond, Virginia. Of the many fond memories I have from that trip, there’s one in particular that tends to rise to the top of my mind whenever I’m reflecting on it: a massive sea of proud Wisconsin cheesemakers cheering each other on as the state took home win after win for its incredible cheeses. I lost count of the number of awards that the state’s cheesemakers took home for cheddars and cheese curds—I’d expected them to shine in those categories. What I wasn’t expecting was for a Wisconsin cheesemaker to take home not one, but two awards for Gouda, a cheese I’d long associated only with Europe.

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