Published on August 31, 2005

Island, Bonnieview Sheep Dairy’s resident supervisor, consults with one of his charges at milking time. Photos by Joseph Gresser

SOUTH ALBANY — Cheeses, like most living things, adhere to their own schedules, regardless of the their creator’s desires.

Neil Urie of Bonnieview Sheep Dairy recalls struggling to make a camembert style cheese one summer.

“I tried to control it, but whatever I did it ripened at forty days,” he said.

Federal law requires cheeses made from raw milk to be aged for at least 60 days before they can be sold, so Mr. Urie lost his labor and the milk that fueled it.

This summer Mr. Urie’s Mossend Blue has taken the opposite tack.  Like a true prima donna, the cheese kept fans waiting this summer, and took its own sweet time to mature.

Every Saturday morning during the warm months open-sided tents appear like so many mushrooms on Craftsbury Common.  Set up in a double row they form a short shopping street, a farmers’ market.

Piles of freshly picked produce compete for attention with flower-filled buckets.  Maple syrup, crafts, and Mexican delicacies are all on display.

Mr. Urie stands under a white awning, surrounded by the products of his South Albany farm.  Ambling shoppers can pause, feel a skein of yarn, stroke a sheepskin, or taste one of his cheeses.

Mr. Urie’s ewe’s milk feta is available all year long.  But a hard cheese he calls Ben Nevis, and a blue called Mossend, are seasonal items.  Both take their names from places in Scotland, Mr. Urie’s ancestral homeland.

This year’s edition of Ben Nevis has been widely available for most of the summer, but until recently the Mossend, an unusual dry, rinded blue cheese, was available only to patrons of the Craftsbury market; only the smaller wheels had matured to Mr. Urie’s satisfaction.

Now the larger wheels have ripened, and there is an ample supply of the blue.  Like Mr. Urie’s other cheese, it is being sold through a wholesale cheese dealer to stores as far away as Boston.  (Sightings in stores as far away as Chicago have also been reported.)

All three cheeses come from the pastures of Mr. Urie’s farm.  There about 200 sheep graze during the summer.

Neil Urie in his milking parlor.

The sheep are a mixture of Friesians and Lincolns.  Mr. Urie works to upgrade the breed, not to achieve purebred stock, but to get increased milk production and produce hardier sheep.

The Friesians, he said, have long ears and tails that are susceptible to frostbite during the harsh Vermont winters.

Twice a day, when Mr. Urie gathers them for milking, the sheep crowd onto a wooden ramp leading to Mr. Urie’s milking parlor.  The screened-in structure is equipped with a European milking system designed especially for sheep.

After Mr. Urie pours a few bags of grain into a holding trough, he can activate a control to allow a measure of grain to fall into place in front of each of the unit’s 12 stanchions.

Mr. Urie pulls a cord to lift the door to the ramp.  A dozen sheep barge into the parlor and quickly sort themselves into place, one per stanchion.  As each occupies herself with the grain, a bar pens them into the stanchion, and the entire contraption slowly rolls toward Mr. Urie, forcing the sheep to back up to the rail of the milking platform.

Mr. Urie quickly washes each ewe’s udder and attaches the milking machine to every other sheep.  The unit is made to milk six sheep at a time.

Ewes have only two teats on their udder, so the machine requires only two teat cups per customer.

As a ewe is finished, Mr. Urie removes the teat cups and switches the machine to her neighbor.

When all 12 are done, Mr. Urie opens another door and releases the ewes to fresh pasture.  His dog Island barks to encourage those stragglers hoping to scrounge a few extra kernels of corn from the floor to hasten their departure.

Mr. Urie can milk his entire herd in an hour and a half, a much shorter time than it took him to milk 70 cows in the days before he switched to raising sheep in 1999.

The milking season for sheep is short, about five months.  Mr. Urie begins milking in May or June and dries his ewes off in October.

A patient group of sheep waits its turn in the milking parlor.

At the start of the season the sheep average five pounds of milk per milking; by midsummer they’re down to three pounds.

His herd produces about 120 gallons per day in May and June, dropping to 70 pounds by the middle of July.

Mr. Urie said the butterfat content of his sheep’s milk varies from 5.5 percent at the beginning of the season to 7 percent by the end.  Sheep’s milk yields twice as much cheese as does cow’s milk, he said.

The milk is piped from the milking parlor to two bulk tanks, one on wheels.  Mr. Urie sells about a third of his production to Albany cheese maker Up The Creek.

He uses the mobile bulk tank to transport milk across the road to his cheese making building.  The milk is pumped into a warming tank.

Mr. Urie adds a cheese culture to the warm milk.  After a 45-minute wait he adds rennet to the cultured milk, which quickly causes it to firm up.

He then takes a device that looks like a series of long stainless steel knives mounted in a rectangular frame and drags it back and forth through the mixture, cutting it into small pieces.  At this point the whey separates from the curds.  He stirs the mixture to assist the separation process.

Mr. Urie then takes the curds, drains them and places them in forms.  To make his three distinct  cheeses, Mr. Urie introduces slight variations into the process.

The blue cheese is stirred more and given time to rest.  This provides air pockets where the veining will occur.  A blue mold and aromatic mold are also introduced before the curds are drained and placed in the molds.

For the Ben Nevis and Mossend cheeses, the curds are very well drained and placed in two different sized rounded forms, one large, the other smaller.

The feta cheese is less thoroughly drained and aged in a mixture of its own whey and brine.

Mr. Urie learned to make feta and Ben Nevis cheese when working for other cheesemakers.  He developed Mossend blue after taking a three-day workshop with Paul Kindstedt, a professor in the University of Vermont’s Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences, who literally wrote the book on producing and selling artisan cheeses.

After taking Mr. Kindstedt’s course, Mr. Urie experimented until he hit on a formula that pleased his palate.

While some Vermont cheesemakers have invested in expensive artificial caves with climate control systems, Mr. Urie has a free-standing refrigeration unit that looks like the back end of a produce truck.  The air inside, he said, is filled with ambient spores that promote the growth of the white mold that ornaments the rinds of his hard cheeses.  While all Mr. Urie’s cheeses are aged in the cooling unit only the hard cheeses are exposed to the atmosphere.  The feta lives in sealed buckets.

Mr. Urie makes enough feta to last the whole year so people won’t forget about Bonnieview cheeses.  But if you want some of the others — seize  the day.