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The Cheese Guide 9 the older generation – people who've accomplished what I want to accomplish," he continued. "They've earned their stripes, the elders." ACS Vice President Jeff Jirik introduced the presentation ceremony for the Lifetime Achievement Award. "There are many who devote their lives and their careers to cheese, and they're in it for the long haul," Jirik said. "This is for the people whose work has a major, long-term impact on the cheese industry." He turned the podium over to Andy Hatch, who started his speech by observing that, "Mike started in the days when the Wisconsin wisdom was to get big or get out. Mike got small and got ahead." Then he began to tell the story of Mike and Carol Gingrich as he knew them. Andy heard about Uplands Cheese the first time while he was a student in the dairy science program at the University of Wisconsin. After he graduated, he came to Mike and asked him for a job. Mike told him to go to Europe for a couple of years and learn more about making cheese, so Andy did that. Then he came back to Uplands and begged for a job until Mike just caved in and hired him as an apprentice in 2007. "Those of us who had the privilege of working on the farm will always remember his humility and his generosity," Andy said. He noted that in those early days, Mike and Carol would come into work on Sunday to clean the bathrooms because that wasn't something they wanted to ask any of their other employees to do. "This was a thin, rocky dairy farm on top of Pleasant Ridge," Andy said. "He made it possible for me, an apprentice with no money to my name, to take over an operation like his." Mike stepped up to the microphone to explain that his wife was ill and unable to travel to the conference, but he'd pass on the best wishes he was receiving. "She'll be very happy," he said, and then he told the story of how Pleasant Ridge Reserve came to be. ACS was founded in 1983, and by the time Mike attended his first conference, held at the University of Wisconsin campus in 1998, he was among about 100 other people who immediately encouraged him to try cheesemaking as a way of preserving the unique flavors he was getting in his milk through his rotational grazing program. "With rotational grazing, you're giving cows new grass every day, so we were convinced that we were getting unique flavors," he said. His first thought about how to do that was to seek out local cheesemakers and persuade them to try out his milk in their signature cheeses, and he had come to the conference looking for those cheesemakers. He met people who invited him to their farms and creameries, who gave him advice on wooden aging boards, who offered help with his business plan and who told him about the University of Wisconsin's Center for Dairy Research. "I thought, Talk about an underserved market. People are climbing mountains. I knew immediately that the business plan I had was worthless," he said. "It was really a life-changing experience." After that meeting, the goal became that, instead of finding a cheesemaker to use the Uplands Farm milk, Mike would find a way to make a unique cheese, and he and his partners would market it themselves. They started tasting cheeses and found Beaufort, a firm alpine cheese made in the French Alps of the Haute-Savoie, with a Protected Designation of Origin since 1968. He went back to the Center for Dairy Research, and the team there started developing a Wisconsin version of the cheese with him. By the winter of 2000, they'd figured out what they were going to make and how they were going to make it. They just didn't have a creamery yet, so when the summer's milk came in, Bob Wills, of Cedar Grove Cheese and Clock Shadow Creamery, sent a truck down to Uplands every other day to pick up Mike and Carol and their milk and bring it down to his creamery to make a batch of cheese. Then, one Saturday in late October, Pleasant Ridge Reserve first appeared on the menu of L'Etoile Restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin and in the cheese case at Madison's Whole Foods Market. "We were in the cheese business," Mike said. The next challenge was to sell the rest of the 600 wheels they made that year, so they decided they'd enter a wheel into the 2001 ACS awards. Pleasant Ridge Reserve won its first best of show award. "Uplands Cheese is a product of ACS," Mike said. "Many of our first customers were people we met at ACS... ACS really produced us." Steve Ehlers was one of those retailers who fell in love with Pleasant Ridge Reserve. He owned Larry's Market in Brown Deer, a suburb of Milwaukee, and before he and his dad Larry introduced fancy cheese to their customers, the commodity cheddar and sliced American cheese that Wisconsin creameries turn out in industrial quantities was pretty much what most Wisconsinites who hadn't traveled outside the country knew of cheese. "At that time, the only cheeses you could get in Wisconsin were commodity cheddar, commodity brick," said Patty Peterson, Steve's sister. That began to change in the 1970s, when Larry and Steve Ehlers, looking for an edge in the grocery business, went to the Summer Fancy Food Show and bought some French cheeses to sell to their upscale customers who'd traveled to Europe and would know what they were. They got that first shipment of French cheese into their store on a Friday afternoon and had sold it all by Saturday at noon, Peterson says. "Of course, my father is the consummate salesman," she adds. "He can still sell like nobody's business." In 2001, Steve was at the American Cheese Society's contest in Louisville, Kentucky, to see Mike Gingrich win his best of show award for Pleasant Ridge Reserve in its first year of production. In the years since then, he and his family made Larry's Market into a conduit that helped elevate the standard for Wisconsin cheeses. "At Larry's Market, we've always tried to nurture and encourage young cheesemakers, not just by buying their products but by giving them honest feedback," Peterson said. Cheesemakers are the people who matter most at this meeting, she said. "That's where most of the information should come from. That being said, without retailers, they're not going to sell their stuff.... This wouldn't be here without the cheesemakers, but the whole chain is important." "It's developing relationships with cheesemakers.... There's a lot of sharing with the group I know," she added. "It's a lot of getting to know