For a few years they were content to make a living selling their exceptional cheese to the likes of Per Se and the Playboy Mansion.  Then they got a call from Cabot, a dairy farm cooperative with 1,350 members.  “We have an idea,” said Cabot.  They offered to make cheddar with milk from their five best farms (measured in terms of milk quality), and give it to Mateo to mature in said cellar.  Because their facility is entirely sterile, not a drop of mold is allowed, but then again, one of the secrets of tasty cheese is mold.  So when the cheese is one day old, they gave it over to its new adoptive daddies, who bound it in muslin and raise it for a year.

One year later, the cheese has a depth of flavor few thought it could achieve.  This past summer, it won Best in Show at the American Cheese Society conference, out of more than a thousand entries.  It was quite a coup for a pasteurized cheese coming out of a factory.  Which of course, it wasn’t entirely. 

This arrangement has proved mutually beneficial to Cabot, which has a pet project it can proudly point to (good PR is worth a thousand blocks of cheddar), but also to the Kehlers, whose sugar daddy has proved a great boon to cash flow.  They’re now in the process of building caves to house more Cabot cheddar, but doing so allows them to store and mature the cheeses produced by their small-potatoes neighbors as well, who may have too little time, energy, expertise, resources or a combination thereof to do the job themselves.

Small artisans and big factories are often pitted against one another like they live in different worlds. Often they do, but in rare cases, the synergy between them can build a whole bigger than the sum of its parts. In the Kehler’s and Cabot’s case, it’s clothbound cheddar, a sweet, fruity expression of Vermont’s fresh green grass.  You can’t taste the teamwork, but it’s there.