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.