How Uplands Cheese is Crafting Raw Excellence

On a bright Tuesday morning in October, Andy Hatch leads a group of cheesemongers into the make room at Uplands Cheese in Dodgeville, Wis. An open vat filled with fresh milk is being stirred and monitored, early steps in converting milk to curds. It’s no ordinary milk, and those curds will ultimately become wheels of one of America’s most extraordinary cheeses, Pleasant Ridge Reserve.

 

Pleasant Ridge Reserve & Rush Creek Reserve

“We use the previous night’s milk, and the morning milk for Pleasant Ridge. We add just a little starter culture,” says Hatch who owns and operates Uplands with his wife and another couple. “Our goal here is to set the right parameters.” A smaller vat has been emptied earlier in the morning. Those curds are in another room, on their way to becoming Rush Creek Reserve, the only other cheese made by the farmstead cheese company that was launched in 2000.

 

Pleasant Ridge is a hard, Alpine-style cheese formed in wheels that weigh about ten pounds. It is made only when Uplands’ cows are grazing on the carefully maintained pastures of the farm, and it is aged for more than a year. Rush Creek Reserve, a Vacheron style cheese, is formed in 12-ounce wheels banded with French spruce bark. Cheeses of this type made in Europe are often brought to maturity in a few weeks, but Uplands slows the maturation to meet U.S. aging requirements for raw milk cheeses.

 

A Two Cheese Farmstead Operation

This season the team will make 50,000 wheels of Rush Creek Reserve, and those will be sold through distributors and retailers (and through direct e-commerce) to eager consumers coast-to-coast. Both cheeses are among the best of their type anywhere. While there are as many as one thousand artisan cheese companies nationwide, a much smaller number of those are farmstead makers, where the freshest milk is coaxed into becoming the most flavorful cheese right on the farm property. And there are just a handful having such sustained, artistic and financial success while focusing on just one or two cheeses. The first shipments of the Rush Creek will have reached shops ahead of Thanksgiving. The final wheels might be sold before the end of the season. Passionate cheese-geek customers will pay about $40 for each wheel and relish this annual treat at holiday gatherings or casual get-togethers.

“I’d like to see more Americans celebrating the end of the year holidays with American foods,” Hatch tells the tour group as they sample different ages of the two cheeses.

 

History of Uplands Cheese

The seeds of Uplands Cheese were planted in 1994 when a different pair of Wisconsin couples combined their dairy herds and purchased five hundred acres about an hour west of the state capital. Mike and Carol Gingrich, and Dan and Jeanne Patenaude were focused on intensive rotational grazing, and with a mixed-breed herd they were soon getting outstanding milk. Like so many other artisan cheesemakers, they soon grew weary of selling that milk for commodity products and receiving minimal financial returns. So they began thinking of making their own cheese, Mike Gingrich recalls. In 1998, the American Cheese Society conference was held in Madison, and while Gingrich had already sketched out a business plan for a cheese business, what he encountered at the conference sharpened his focus.

“The lesson I took away from the conference is that there were a whole lot of people in the industry who were desperately looking for unique product,” says Gingrich, who had left a marketing and sales job with the Xerox Company to help establish the farm. “I came away thinking ‘Wow! I have never seen a market like this.’ People were begging for that product.”

A revised business plan zeroed in on making a cheese similar Alpage Beaufort, a grass-fed cheese made only when French cheesemakers are grazing their animals in lush mountain pastures. The plan called for a cheese made with raw milk, with evening and morning milk combined, and aged to develop a natural rind. While quality Wisconsin Cheddars were priced at about $2.50 a pound wholesale, the yet-to-be-named Pleasant Ridge would sell for four times that much. “Another lesson we learned from ACS was that the only way to get a premium price is if it tastes incredible,” Gingrich says.

 

Coming Out Party

By 2000 a make recipe had been developed with assistance from the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research, and Gingrich was working with nearby Cedar Grove Creamery to produce test batches. The cheese did in fact taste incredible, and in 2001 Pleasant Ridge was being featured on the menu at a Madison French restaurant and showing up on the counter at the local Whole Foods. Florence Fabricant, food writer for the New York Times, wrote lovingly of the Pleasant Ridge, expressing shock that a cheese of such character had been made stateside. In August of that year, the ACS conference was held in Louisville, Ky., and Uplands put their cheese in the competition with about 1,000 others. Not only did it win first place in its category, it also took best of show. Pleasant Ridge has gone on to win that award two more times, and has also been recognized at the World Cheese Awards. The artisan cheese world took notice.

“Pleasant Ridge, in my memory, was only the second Alpine-style cheese made in America,” recalls Debra Dickerson who has been promoting and selling artisan cheese for decades—lately for Jasper Hill and for the Fine Cheese Company. “It was such a solid, universally beloved cheese! It is one of those cheeses, that no matter what you like, it just takes over. I always say it is a cheese that can make me shut up.”

Dickerson said her first visit with Mike Gingrich opened her eyes to the connection between grass and cheese. “I remember walking in the fields with Mike, and him talking about the diversity in the pasture,” she says. “I remember him pulling up Timothy grass, and talking about how it would contribute certain characteristics of the milk.”

 

The Business Evolves

Hatch joined Uplands as an apprentice in 2006. He had been studying agriculture and working as a Wisconsin corn breeder. He had fallen into cheesemaking while traveling in Europe, and after speaking with Gingrich while doing research for a college paper, he was soon learning how to make Pleasant Ridge Reserve. Scott Mericka joined the team a couple of years later on the herd management side, and soon the two had earned manager roles. In 2014 Hatch and Mericka purchased the company from its founders. They now run it with help from their wives. Each couple is also raising two children on the farm.

Recently Uplands invested in automated equipment for wrapping Rush Creek wheels, and as early as 2025 an expansion will begin that will nearly double the facility’s aging capacity. With improvements also needed on the farm side, Hatch says the details and timing are still fluid.

“We have designs that have been approved by the state,” Hatch says. “We are just struggling with the cost of construction and the high interest rate. We are also wary of taking on more debt to where we might be forced into an accelerated growth that we are not comfortable with.”

Down the road?

“We might add a third cheese,” Hatch says, “And we could potentially age cheeses for some of our neighbors.” That might also take the form of providing European-model affinage, wherein Uplands would purchase young, un-ripened cheeses and age them out. The collaborative cheese would then be marketed as a co-branded product with distinct characteristics.

“It’s a long game and a slow game,” Hatch says of future business plans and dreams. “We think it’s important to respect the integrity of how we do things here. We’re trying to make sure that we make the right choices.”

So far, they seem to have made all the right choices.