Behind Willi Lehner’s house in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, under a hillock of craggy earth supported by a wall of stone slabs, is a bunker that’s supposed to withstand tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes. The manufacturer of the kit it was made from, Formworks, even claims that one of the same design survived a simulated nuclear blast. But Lehner , a 52-year-old cheese maker, isn’t preparing for the apocalypse—he’s just trying to protect his wheels of bandaged cheddar, farmstead Käse, Havarti, and Gouda.
That flavor won Lehner and his Bleu Mont Dairy a blue ribbon at the American Cheese Society Conference in 2006. He had inoculated the winning cheese with mold spores scraped from classic English cheddars, but it also benefited from the ambient Wisconsin microflora. Microorganisms that act on some of his other cheeses come from the soil on his property, which sits at the edge of the rough Driftless region of southwestern Wisconsin, an area that escaped the glacial scraping of the last Ice Age. Lehner got the idea to harvest microorganisms from local dirt after a tour of farmstead cheese makers in the UK, but his appreciation of the influence of terroir on cheese developed in his youth, during a summer spent herding cows and making cheese in the Swiss Alps.
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Lehner’s father, Billi, was born in the Swiss canton of Lucerne, where he went through a three-year apprenticeship making Emmenthaler before emigrating with his wife, Mary, in 1952. They drifted around a bit, farming and logging, before he learned about Wisconsin’s Little Switzerland, in the region around New Glarus. He figured if he could make a go of cheese making anywhere, that would be the place, and found work at a cheese factory in nearby Mount Horeb, which he managed for 21 years. Now home of the Grumpy Troll brewpub, that plant is where he introduced Willi and his five siblings to the trade. At first Willi’s jobs were cleaning up and building boxes, but in his teens he got involved in making, waxing, and packing cheese.
Ever since, Lehner, who says he’s “always experimenting,” has taken a series of steps back from the process of modern industrial cheese production, moving toward a traditional approach closer to the one his father grew up with. First he started making cheese with organic milk, then with raw organic milk. In 2003 he procured a license to operate a small temperature-controlled curing room off the straw-bale greenhouse next to his house. This let him age his cheeses without using plastic, which prevents shrinkage but also shuts out the thousands of varieties of microbes that can contribute to the development of an extraordinary cheese. During this phase of experimentation with surface curing he also made his first bandaged cheddar, wrapped in cloth and painted with lard to prevent it from cracking as it ages.
Lehner, who still sells only at the Dane County market, says he didn’t intend this to sound boastful. But it bears out even with what he considers his less successful experiments, such as a batch of cheddar that smelled like “barf” and reminded him and McKnight of a hard Italian cheese, a style neither particularly cares for. Rather than toss out all 2,500 pounds of it, they branded it “Italian cheddar” and made sure marketgoers who showed interest tried a sample before buying it. Most turned it down, but occasionally someone loved it, and after about two years it sold out. “I think last year was the first time in about five years we haven’t had someone at least once during the market season come and ask if we have any more Italian cheddar,” says McKnight.
Wisconsin
