Oser Communications Group

BY LORRIE BAUMANN Sarah Marcus' cheeses speak a language of transformation, expressing in their flavors the creative potential of change. "Fall milk is my favorite. I love it. It makes great cheese," she says. "Summer milk is nice because I like the flavors of the grasses, but the fall milk has those luscious richer flavors. I just like cheese – that's it. Year-round..... I'm a little obsessive, but I do love it. I love cheese." Her Briar Rose Creamery is tucked between vineyards in the hills of the Willamette Valley above Dundee, Oregon, about 30 miles south of Portland. The nearby vineyards bring tourists into the area for wine tours, and Marcus is always happy to explain to her customers how well her cheeses will pair with the local pinot noir. "People vacation here because there are so many vineyards within 20 miles," she says. "I think there are 100 of them within two miles." Briar Rose cheese is made four times a week from milk that comes twice a week from two dairies across the Willamette Valley. Milk from the Ayrshire herd is used to make Fromage Blanc; Callisto, a semi-firm washed-rind cow's milk aged about three months with a nutty tanginess; and Maia, a soft, washed-rind cheese with a fudgy texture. Milk from the Guernsey herd is sweeter, and Marcus uses it to make her Damona, a Havarti-style cheese; Honnalee, a washed-rind version of Damona; and Butterbloom, a soft bloomy-rind cheese with a texture that ages from velvet to custard in two to 10 weeks. ""I don't know if it's the diet or the breed, but that [Guernsey] milk tastes like ice cream. The Ayrshire milk, on the other hand, has stronger savory notes," she says. "I like those qualities." Guernsey milk also goes into Fata Morgana, a cow milk interpretation of feta that Marcus named for coastal mirages of ships or islands that sometimes occur over the ocean. The term comes from a Sicilian legend that these mirages were created by Morgan Le Fay, the fairy-witch of the Arthurian legend, as a means of luring sailors to their deaths. The legend is connected in Marcus' mind with the Homeric Odyssey tale in which Odysseus discovered Polyphemus in his cave with his flock of sheep and goats. The story is inspirational for a cheesemaker, Marcus said. "It goes into great detail about cheesemaking. It's one of the first recorded instances, and it was feta that the Cyclops was making," she says. "There was this crossover between feta and Morgan Le Fay, and I thought that was so cool!" Marcus' path to Briar Rose was as winding as the road that flows through the hills between the small town of Dundee to her doorstep. She grew up in San Rafael, California, and got a degree in communication that led to a production job at San Francisco radio stations. From there, she becamse a music buyer for a new and used record store. That retail experience, and the confidence it gave her in her ability to pair customers with music that they'd love, was part of what she had to offer when she applied for a sales job at Cowgirl Creamery. "I know how to sell," she says. She was confident that, just as she'd learned a vocabulary for describing a piece of music to a customer, she could also learn a vocabulary to describe a piece of cheese. "Developing that vocabulary was something I was pretty good at," she says. "Going from music to cheese was about learning the vocabulary." Her experience selling cheese for Cowgirl Creamery taught her that what she really wanted to do with cheese was to sell cheeses that she'd made herself. She took herself off to Cal Poly to learn how to 16 The Cheese Guide Sarah Marcus cheese speaking language the of

• Cover