Shaft's Bleu

Who says you need to graze cows on the back forty to make good cheese?

Most American artisanal cheese companies spring out of a dairy farm. Usually it’s one run by the cheesemakers themselves. When sales get good enough, they sometimes buy milk from a neighboring farm, but close proximity between cheesemaker and milk source is generally a given.

Not so with the people making Shaft’s in Rocklin, Calif., a suburb of Sacramento. Their stock in trade is not milking animals, but in aging cheese. So instead of raising animals themselves, they buy their cheese young, from a farm in Wisconsin. Then they ship it to California, where it is aged in a former gold mine in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Now, in France, it is a big deal to hold the job of l’affineur – he is the guy charged with managing a cellar full of cheese until it is aged to perfection. But somehow in the United States, it’s the farmstead itself that gets a lot of the glory.

Maybe we should rethink that, at least a bit. The Shaft’s Bleu (funny French spelling and all) is a robust, full-bodied variety. It’s sweeter than, say, Roquefort, but still has plenty of tang at the back. Befitting a proper blue, it smells like the Dickens, a very good thing indeed.