Good cheese is almost a living thing. Its flavor and texture change with the climate and seasons in a reminder of the natural world.

Until farmers learned how to tinker with cows, how to time calving to go year round, cheese wasn't even made in the winter. Obviously, says Portia McKnight, you get cheese only when cows are producing milk to feed their calves.

McKnight and Flo Hawley, her partner at Chapel Hill Creamery in Orange County, are glad for many reasons to see the glowing green of new spring grass pushing up despite a serious lack of spring showers. Cheese production generally stops between December and March, when the first calves appear. On their 37-acre farm, McKnight and Hawley are now tending 15 calves along with 18 adult milking cows.

Like life itself, cheese is made up of what you put into it. Give it your best, and the best is likely to come back to you, though things can go wrong for no obvious reason. Maybe it is life's way of reminding us that a little unpredictability can be a good thing.

I love cheese. I once dragged my husband on a cheese tour of Normandy, where we got lost driving through the hills but ate some great Camembert (and drank some fine Calvados). In Tuscany, I got so excited trying to photograph a cheesemaker that I got clipped by a slow-moving pickup truck. Domestically, I loiter at cheese counters. A recent visit to Chapel Hill Creamery brought me close to heaven.

The creamery makes some of the area's best cheese (it's sold at Weaver Street Market in Carrboro, the Carrboro Farmers Market, the State Farmers Market, the Durham Farmers Market and Whole Foods). The semi-firm Hickory Grove was named one of the South's 10 best cheeses by the Southern Foodways Alliance last year. The creamery makes half a dozen kinds of cheese, including a cow's-milk feta-style that it must call Pheta because of the Greek government's crackdown on the use of the term feta for non-Greek-made cheese.

One of the creamery's best-known cheeses is fresh, handmade mozzarella -- a rarity that many cheese fans have never tasted. Yes, you can buy fresh mozzarella -- as in not the shredded stuff in bags -- in the form of soft, white balls in plastic containers at some specialty grocery stores. But truly fresh mozzarella -- as in made mere hours ago -- is harder to find.

The fresh, new grass started McKnight and me talking about the mozzarella. The herd is fed primarily on grass, with a small amount of grain supplement. But not just any grass. The farm uses a rotational grazing system that feeds the herd on grasses that provide different nutrition. In the spring, an early grazing rye is the first grass, then about five other grasses are grown as the season progresses through summer and fall.

The cows are moved to a different section of pasture every 12 hours. This rotation allows the cows to eat only the most nutritious part of the grass, the first four or five inches, and it lets the grass recover instead of being constantly eaten and trampled.

It also eliminates the need to do manure duty. The cows spread it around themselves.

As the year goes on, each type of grass lends a different quality to the milk the cows produce and, ultimately, to the cheeses.

McKnight says the early spring milk, the kind she is using now, has a grassy, astringent flavor. Cows gobble up the fresh grass in the spring after a long winter without it, which puts a lot of beta carotene into the milk. That gives cheeses made now a yellow or sand-colored cast.

"Fall milk is high in fat and very rich," she says. "It's a real challenge to work with as a cheesemaker. It's hard to drive the whey out. But it makes a particularly good soft and semisoft cheese. Our Carolina Moon in the fall is really special, and Hickory Grove almost tastes like a different cheese."

Shortly after starting the creamery in 2001, McKnight and Hawley decided they did not want to depend on outside sources for milk. They wanted to know what was in their cheese literally from the ground up.

Holsteins are preferred by dairies because they produce a lot of milk. But the cheesemakers wanted quality milk with a high level of milk solids, which meant Jersey cows. Obviously, it's girls only in this sorority -- male calves are sold for, uh, other uses.

"I enjoy having the cows," McKnight says. "It's not supposed to be that way, but I have 30-some pets. They all have names. It makes me happy to open up the gate and see them go eat grass."

Making fresh mozzarella is similar to working bread dough. There is science involved -- measuring the pH and temperature, for example -- but much of the process requires experience.

As with dough, if you overwork the mozzarella, the texture suffers and it becomes slightly tough. Experienced hands are frugal with their motions. They pull, stretch and fold the thick strands of cheese, about two feet long, as if trying to gently handle a heavy, wet towel. A minimum of motion achieves balls that are as smooth and shiny as balloons, with a light-as-air texture and fresh-cream flavor and that tartness of the spring grass.

"It's a very tricky cheese to make," she says. "There's a tight window of opportunity to get it right."

McKnight says she aims for a ball the size of a summer tomato, because most people use fresh mozzarella for the classic Italian salad of tomatoes, slices of the cheese, shreds of fresh basil and olive oil. I add a sprinkling of balsamic vinegar to my version, because I like the tart-sweet flavor.

The bits left from twisting and folding the ball on the bottom (folds are a sign of a hand-made mozzarella) are tossed into a bin. Combined, the bits will be a little tough in texture, but the extra firmness is perfect for the smoking process. McKnight takes those balls to the Barbecue Joint, where they are cold-smoked for two to three hours. The flavor is great in such things as quesadillas.

As in life, no experience is truly a wasted one. Wonder what summer will taste like?

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