Oser Communications Group

8 The Cheese Guide BY LORRIE BAUMANN The American Cheese Society presented its Lifetime Achievement Award this year to Mike and Carol Gingrich, who, together with their partners Dan and Jeanne Patenaude, are the people behind Pleasant Ridge Reserve, the only cheese ever to have won the American Cheese Society's Best of Show award three times. Given the growth of the American artisanal cheese community over the years since 2001, when Pleasant Ridge Reserve was first made, it is unlikely that that record will ever be topped. When the American Cheese Society held its first contest in 1985, 30 companies entered 89 cheeses. This year, 260 cheesemakers entered 1,843 cheeses into the ACS' annual cheese competition, and the size of the organization has nearly doubled over the last decade to almost 1,700 current members. "This year's cheese was without a doubt the best cheese that's ever come through competition," said American Cheese Society President Dick Roe. That growth reflects Americans' growing love affair with cheese. Whether they're grating it over pasta, draping slices over their burgers or stirring shreds into the sauce for a mac and cheese, Americans can't get enough of the stuff. The Department of Agriculture reported that Americans ate an average of 33.9 pounds of cheese per person in 2014, a figure that has more than doubled since 1975, when the average American ate 14.2 pounds of cheese per year. The Gingrich and Patenaude families began their partnership with the idea that their Wisconsin dairy farm would be based on ideas about rotational grazing that were then new. Or rather, very old. Their idea was that by letting the cows go out into the pasture to roam around they would eat a variety of mixed grasses and forbs. They'd keep the cows from overgrazing their favorite bit of pasture until they'd eaten it down to the ground by moving them frequently between small paddocks surrounded by electric fencing. That would keep the pastures healthy and allow the cows to enjoy more freedom, to live lives more like those of their ancestral ruminants, an animal classification that includes not only cattle but sheep, goats and camels. "It's better for the cows. It's better for the land. It's better for the farmer," said Andy Hatch, who bought Uplands cheese two years ago along with his own partners, his wife, Caitlin, and Scott and Liana Mericka. Andy makes the cheese, and Scott manages the herd. As they improved their pastures with a healthy mix of vegetation, Mike and Dan started thinking that they could make better use of the flavors in the milk their cows had begun producing by making it into cheese rather than selling it into the local commodity milk market. Today, Andy and Scott manage Uplands Cheese pretty much the same way that Mike and Dan did, as a 300-acre farmstead whose 150 cows are born and bred on pastures that are intensively managed to provide the cows with a rich and varied diet and to preserve the health of the land. "We've grown, but we're still staying true to those original principles.... Our intention is to not change the way we do things," Andy told me when I met him for the first time on a Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board- sponsored visit to Uplands Cheese. I met him again at the American Cheese Society's annual meeting at the end of July, where he was taking part in the event that drew around 1,200 cheesemakers, cheesemongers and cheese enthusiasts from around the U.S. to Des Moines, Iowa, for a few days of continuing education, professional networking, fellowship with the community, strutting of t-shirts declaring an allegiance to cheese, and quite a lot of appreciation for the products of other artisans who share cheesemakers' respect for, and indebtedness to, the natural microorganisms that ferment milk into cheese, grain into beer and grapes into wine, as well as, of course, the annual contest that recognizes their cheeses for their aesthetic and technical merit. Known familiarly as "Cheese Camp," this was the ACS' 33rd annual conference and competition, and Andy was there partly to reunite with his fellow cheesemakers and partly to present the Lifetime Achievement Award to his mentor. "It feels unmissable in the same way that a family reunion or a college roommate's wedding feels unmissable," he said. "This is the one time of the year when nearly all of us, the tribe, gather." "It's a chance for us in the younger generation to spend time with curd nerds among the

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