This article originally appeared in The Ontario Farmer, December 20 2005
Reproduced with permission: © Copyright 2005, Sun Media Corporation
"Cheese is the new wine!" Canada's national newspaper reports on the front of its 'Style' section.
The comparison has legs. Both reflect "le gout de terroir" - the taste of the earth that nourished plants and animals that yield their main ingredients. So much so that some of the European varieties now lay claim to an Appellation d'Origine Controlee.
Like wine, fine cheeses are carefully aged, some in cellars, some in caves. And like wine, these cheeses reveal the most nuanced taste and texture when allowed to breath at room temperature.
What the article doesn't say is that there's an emerging artisanal and farmstead cheese industry in this province. It's at the stage that Ontario's estate winery approached 20 years ago - and it's being led by the sheep milk producers who are currently unencumbered by provincial regulations.
Visit the farmer's markets in Carp and Creemore and you'll find boutique cheeses that are handmade in small batches. They carry names like Madawaska, after the river in Eastern Ontario, and Dalhousie, after the township where Jim Keith runs his Icelandic sheep and operates his "petite fromagerie" called Back Forty Artisan Cheese—a commercial kitchen off his farmhouse in the Lanark Highlands southwest of Ottawa.
Violet Hill, an ash-covered, white mould-ripened pyramid of cheese, made by hand by Stephanie Diamant, of Milky Way Farm near Creemore, north of Toronto, looks as lovely as its name. She rents a licensed commercial kitchen to make her cheeses. They include Honeywood, a traditional, hard, mountain sheep's cheese with a natural rind, and an earthy flavour, and Creemore, which is like a camembert, with sheep's milk.
The names deliberately reflect the land where the sheep are pastured.
"I want to do what very few people do in cheesemaking at the moment: be able to brand my cheese as coming from me," explains Diamant. "I have control over the whole process. That's what vineyards do…focus on the story from beginning to end. The grass, in the place. That's been lost in this grand rush to commercialize."
Diamant arrived at the decision slowly, as her initial passion was shepherding. That lead to selling milk, and eventually to making cheese. But this year, said Diamant, "we made a conscious decision to focus on the cheese end of things, so we made a conscious decision to reduce our flock."
They cut the number of ewes in half, from 100 to 50, and may do so again in 2006.
"There's nothing nicer than standing there on a Saturday morning at the farmers market and hearing people say 'This is wonderful. This is better than the cheese in France'. For me, that is the gratification and inspiration to go back and slog it out during lambing time."
"THE ONTARIO SHEEP cheese industry has the potential of being like the Ontario wine industry if we play our cards right," agrees Eric Bzikot, of Conn. "It's a luxury product."
And, he said, there is a segment of the population who come to the St. Lawrence Market in downtown Toronto and buy his cheese because they know they can drive two hours north and see the sheep in the fields that produce the milk from whence it's made.
Seeing the actual cheesemaking plant is difficult, however, as Ewenity Dairy Co-op leases facilities and processing. Only last week, after two years of effort, Bzikot received a green light to build an on-farm fromagerie.
The Ministry of the Environment has finally approved the proposed waste water disposal system, allowing Bzikots to apply for a building permit for construction to begin.
Bzikot and his wife, Elisabeth, who chairs the co-op, could produce enough milk on their Best Baa Farm, to fill the plant themselves, but Bzikot says, "I do not want to milk 300 or 400 ewes."
EWENITY CO-OP'S half dozen members are not marketing a particular "terroir", but they share a similar "smaller is better" philosophy and a sense of humour. Eweda and Ramembert are among their offerings, distributed through about 40 shops in Toronto and three farmer's markets.
"We are hoping during the next year to get our own plant up and going," said Bzikot - but he's prepared for more hurdles, because he said that last year too.
"I don't need a damn plant," admits Bzikot. "I should really get a golf cart. But it's more fun to see this industry develop. For me, the nicest thing that I can imagine is ten years from now, two or three hundred farms with 100 sheep on them."
Ruth Klahsen is another sheep's cheese maker who is marketing an ideal as much as she's marketing cheeses. Working out of the updated Millbank Cheese building, in the heart of Mennonite country, and sourcing her sheep's milk from "southwestern Ontario Mennonite shepherds", Klahsen promotes Monforte as a premium, socially conscious, artisanal cheese.
The flyer that accompanies Monforte cheese rounds lists six principles of production including "trading fairly with our Amish and Mennonite shepherds, building a sheep dairy industry viable for all participants, and ensuring the welfare of the sheep whose milk we use."
FURTHER SOUTH, at Jordan Station on the Niagara Peninsula, Wayne Philbrick opened the doors of his Upper Canada Cheese Company just last week, after two years of working to get access to cow's milk through the Domestic Dairy Product Innovation Program.
He's making just two cheeses, using the milk from a single Guernsey herd, processing 800 litres a day, seven days a week.
"This Guernsey milk is gorgeous," Philbrick enthuses. It makes a naturally yellow cheese. "We're not balancing the cream in our milk. We take it as it comes so it varies a bit from season to season."
There are five people working in the plant and everything is done by hand. The cheese is hand-washed, hand-molded, hand-salted and hand-wrapped.
Upper Canada's two cheese varieties are a camembert-style Comfort Cream, named after the farm family that provides the milk, and Niagara Gold, a washed rind cheese named for the territory and its colour.
"It's like a boutique wine," says Philbrick, who is also involved with the Malivoire Winery. The cheese will only be available at Jordan Station and several fine restaurants.
So today, cheese sommeliers are able to follow the initial sketch of a cheese trail, across the province, from Lanark, to Creemore, Conn, Millbank and Jordan Station.
These culinary tourists will not only learn the lay of the land, but taste its pastures, their plants and even the personalities of the cheesemakers.
And there are plans underway for more fromageries in Glengarry, Prince Edward County and Freelton.
"If we play our cards right, the future's wonderful, as nice as it is now for Ontario's wine industry," concludes Bzikot.
© Copyright 2005, Ontario Farmer Unauthorized reproduction or Web posting prohibited.