Cheese-making takes off

Demand for sophisticated tastes, textures nurtures a booming industry

The map at the Southern Cheesemakers' Guild Web site tells the story:

The location of every cheese maker in the guild is marked with a little cube. There's a cube in Georgia and one in Alabama, one in South Carolina and a few scattered across Tennessee and Virginia.

Then there's North Carolina, with more cheese cubes than a deli tray. The map shows eight members here, more than in the rest of the Southern states combined.

And that's not even close to the total when you count all the licensed cheese makers. The state Department of Agriculture lists 26, with more on the way.

From Yellow Branch Farmstead Cheese far up in the western mountains to Nature's Way near Wilmington, North Carolina is in a cheese boom.

"We're far ahead of most of the other Southern states," says Gary Cartwright, who manages research in the department of food bioprocessing at N.C. State University in Raleigh. "People from Kentucky and Tennessee come here to try to figure it out."

What's turning us into cheese lovers in paradise? It is partly just the usual things that have made Americans into lovers of more sophisticated food -- more travel, more exposure to fine dining, more appreciation for distinctive regional flavors.

Then there's the local food movement. Farm-made cheeses fit right into its emphasis on handmade, small-batch products.

"This is creating an audience for cheese makers," says Laura Werlin, the California-based author of books such as "The New American Cheese."

"That market is pretty new."

Goat Lady Dairy started it all

But why is North Carolina leading the way in the South?

To start, the state has the lucky accident of geography. Goat Lady Dairy south of Greensboro was one of the first to really get serious about making cheese in the state. Steve Tate and his wife, Lee, joined his sister, Ginnie Tate, to raise dairy goats in Randolph County in the mid-1990s.

'Fertile crescent' of N.C.

Tate likes to describe a big part of the state as "the fertile crescent." If you draw a backward C over the state, he says, it would go from the Triad -- Greensboro, High Point and Winston-Salem -- backward through Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh and then back over to Charlotte. Any farm within that is close enough to get a fresh farm product to an urban market.

"If you think of the millions of people who live in that big C, and all the nice farmland within that, that's big potential," Tate said. "And it's growing."

Cathy Strange, cheese buyer for the Whole Foods chain, says the growth in North Carolina has been obvious.

"Vermont would be the leader, but [North Carolina] would be up there. "North Carolina has done incredible things."

Nurturing the industry

People who work with cheese makers in the state say all this growth is no accident. The state has been progressive in finding ways to support it.

Similar to what happened with the state's wine industry, programs to support cheese makers have sprung up, including training classes and loans of expensive pasteurizers.

After both Goat Lady and Celebrity Dairy got started in the 1990s, their owners began leading workshops for other farmers. Then N.C. State got involved, and now the university teaches a yearly program on small-batch cheese making.

"It was almost spontaneous generation," says N.C. State's Cartwright. "The need was there, and we just jumped in and tried to fill it.

"Now local and slow food has got everybody's attention. The farmstead [cheese program] was coming along in parallel with that, and it was a perfect mix. The need to keep people on the family farm is so what we need to be doing in North Carolina."