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6 The Cheese Guide BY LORRIE BAUMANN David Gremmels' addictions are cheese, chocolate and coffee, not necessarily in that exact order at any given moment. "I can tell you what's in my fridge with cheese," he said as he drove the 31 miles between Rogue Creamery in Central Point, Oregon, and the Rogue Creamery Dairy Farm in the countryside near Grants Pass, Oregon. Those are, in the order they came to his mind: a piece of "that lovely Tarentaise" (Farms for City Kids Foundation/Spring Brook Farm, Vermont, winner of this year's best of show award at the American Cheese Society Judging & Competition), Mt. Tam (Cowgirl Creamery, California), a piece of handmade Halloumi from Cyprus (Aphrodite), TouVelle (Rogue Creamery), Mount Mazama (Rogue Creamery), a few wedges of Rogue River Blue (Rogue Creamery) and a single wedge of Smokey Blue (Rogue Creamery) that he'd temporarily misplaced, so that he'd had to root through the refrigerator for it when he'd had a craving the previous evening. He found it at the back of his cheese drawer. "I knew I had a wedge," he said with an air of triumph. "Those are the things I think about as far as my food group addictions." Though he didn't say so when I met with him in Oregon last October, he has other obvious addictions: chief among them, he's completely hooked on the people he works with at Rogue Creamery. He knows how they came to Rogue Creamery, he knows many of their families, and several of them emerged from their offices to greet him when he and I arrived together at his administrative office in a vintage cold-packing plant that serves as the creamery's warehouse and packaging facility. Gremmels was the one reaching out for the hugs that were being exchanged all around, but when he did, people leaned in. No one looked surprised. No one seemed to be faking it for the visiting reporter. A Parable About Business There's an old parable that business consultants like to toss around, and like all good parables, it is certainly apocryphal – told, not for the purpose of literal truth, but to make a point. It seems that there was once a business consultant who'd been called to inspect the work on the Notre Dame cathedral at Chartres. As he walked around, he came across a worker and asked him what he was doing. "I'm mixing mortar," the man said, in the tone of someone who has been asked the obvious. The consultant walked a little further along the wall and came to a man who was troweling mortar onto a block of limestone. He asked this man about his job. "I am building a wall," the man said as he dropped the stone onto its course. He walked further along the wall and came to the man who was sweeping the floor in front of the wall, clearing away the dust and grime of construction. "Tell me about your job here," the consultant asked. "I am helping to build a cathedral to the greater glory of God," the worker told him. cheese a blue cathedral of building David Gremmel

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