It’s possible today to make commercial cheese that hands never touch. Milk is trucked to the plant and goes in one end of the production line and packaged cheese comes out the other. How dreary is that?
The cheeses I write about aren’t made like that, but they aren’t often made by old-time methods either—on a farm, from the raw milk of the family’s flock, with hands cutting the curd and flipping the wheels and humans making decisions at every step. The exceptional new Spanish cheese pictured above is an example of the distinction a cheese can achieve when made the hands-on, purist way.
This handsome wheel, El Abuelo Ruperto (“Grandpa Rupert”), is named for the patriarch of the family, people who are longtime sheep ranchers in Spain’s Murcia region. They now manage 4,000 Lacaune sheep, widely considered among the best dairy breeds. (It’s the breed used for Roquefort.) The family farm produces most of the flock’s feed and the ewes’ milk goes straight to the cheesemaking vat. It’s never chilled, which is a plus. Refrigerating milk is essential if the milk has to travel—which most cheese milk does—but chilling compromises its ability to coagulate. For cheesemaking, milk that has never been refrigerated is ideal, if not often possible.
Dairy divas: Lacaune sheep at Quesos Ruperto
El Abuelo Ruperto tastes like the kind of cheese that Cervantes might have known, the type of firm aged sheep wheel that has symbolized Spanish cheesemaking for centuries. But it’s a new creation. Llorema Madrid Zapata, the farm’s third-generation co-owner, led the family’s transition from meat sheep to dairy sheep less than a decade ago. She decided only in 2017 to channel some of the farm’s milk into cheesemaking. How quickly she has mastered the art. She is winning ribbons in prestigious European competitions for this cheese and others, like the superb Luna Llena.
El Abuelo Ruperto is a 5-pound wheel matured for at least six months. The natural rind is so lovely—thin and even and alive with mold (good mold). The interior is firm and dense, with aromas of bacon, roasted nuts, custard and artichoke and a lively, lemony finish. The importer describes it as having a pineapple note but I don’t detect that.
Given how much cheese I have in my life, I’m pretty good at pacing myself, but I could hardly stop eating this. I can pretty much guarantee that El Abuelo Ruperto is the cheese I would head for, and demolish, first on any cheese board.
Distribution is limited but you can always agitate for it at your favorite independent shop. Look for El Abuelo Ruperto at Bloomy Cheese & Provisions (Dobbs Ferry, NY), Cheese School of San Francisco, Cheese Traveler (Albany, NY), Cheese Wheel Village Market (Tiverton, RI), Gold Star Beer (Brooklyn), The Gourmet Shop (Columbia, SC), Jensen’s Market (Los Angeles), Orrman’s Cheese Shop (Charlotte, NC), Sahadi’s (Industry City, NY) Sonoma Cheese Factory (Sonoma), The Spanish Table (San Francisco) and Van Hook Cheese & Grocery (Montclair, NJ).