Nicknames can be tricky things when they are bestowed upon you, especially if they catch on quickly and are not easily shed. But for Diana Brier of Las Vegas’s Valley Cheese & Wine, when a former employer referred to her as the “Wonder Woman of Cheese,” it made perfect sense for her to just own it. And own it she fully does: it’s even her Instagram handle.
The nickname was initially given based on a couple of actual, physical similarities between Brier and the DC Comics hero: both with the name Diana, Brier’s only readily visible tattoos are a pair of wrist cuffs. (No mention yet of a magic lasso or the ability to make people tell the truth, but honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised. She definitely has a way to encourage the honesty of cheese.)
It takes more than just poetic similarities to carry off a superlative, superhero nickname, however, even in the esoteric realm of cheese, but Brier acknowledges that she has the cred to back it up: “I am kind of an unusual person in the cheese industry because I have done the pasteurization, the affinage, the make procedures from start to finish, the distribution, the warehousing…’” she says. “I’ve done consulting for restaurants, I’ve done mongering, I’ve done shop ownership…there’s not really any element of the supply chain that I haven’t touched when it comes to cheese.”
Wonder Woman Origin Story
Brier’s story also reads like any epic superhero tale, with elements of overcoming major adversity, of rebirth, and even a touch of the supernatural or omniscient: “Cheese has always offered me the next step before I even knew what it was going to be,” she says. “It really did pick me. It was not the other way around.”
A Texas native, Brier began college as a musical theater student, and left several years later with a degree in business management. Post-college she was working as a financial analyst in Utah while teaching pole dancing classes, constantly seeking balance between analytical and creative talents, when a major health scare—to wildly under-exaggerate—caused a seismic shift in her personality and priorities. Here, in an especially vulnerable moment, cheese found her for the first time.
“Food was always a love language,” says Brier, when she decided to apply for a job at Whole Foods as a means of income while she manifested a reimagined, but yet uncertain future. She hadn’t specifically applied for the cheese counter, but when that was offered she thought, “Well? Who doesn’t like cheese? I think my first password on the computer was ‘cheese!’ I didn’t know that it could be a career.”
That employment at Whole Foods turned out to be Cheese 101 for Brier, and the thing that brought the previously warring sides of her brain into a much-needed peace treaty. “It was like, this is it,” she says. “This is the marriage of art and science that I’ve been looking for. This is human ingenuity. And this is creativity. This has formed out of a need to survive and a desire to thrive. This is a perfect relationship between human and animal and animal and Earth.”
The Evolution of Cheese Power
Once committed, Brier’s life quickly became all about cheese. “It really grabbed a hold of me in a way that, everyday for 8 years, I did nothing but read cheese books,” she says.
From Whole Foods she ended up at Harmons in Utah, which she describes as having an amazing education program for their mongers that appealed to her neverending desire for knowledge. Through Harmons, she became friendly with local cheesemakers, and when she offered herself as an apprentice to a cheesemaker at Deer Valley Resort in Park City, simply out of interest in seeing the process up close, cheese again upped the ante on its plan for her. “Their cheesemaker said, ‘I can’t believe you called me today. I just put in my two weeks’ notice. Why don’t you come be the new cheesemaker, and I’ll train you,’” recalls Brier. “That’s how cheese has happened every single time. Next week I was making cheese and within two weeks, I had taken over all of the make procedures.”
Rogue River Blue on a plate photo courtesy Rogue River Creamery
Oregon’s Rogue Creamery, even though it hadn’t yet catapulted to worldwide fame through its success with Rogue River Blue, was nonetheless what Brier thought would be her eventual end game in the cheese world. “Like end end end game,” says Brier. So naturally she was offered a job there as lead production manager basically within seconds of deciding to leave Deer Valley. (Okay it was more like months, with a mongering stint in between, but still, a magic lasso has to be involved, right?)
Having overseen the batch of Rogue River Blue that would eventually win top honors in 2019, Brier nonetheless needed to leave Oregon’s damp climate, with heartbreaking urgency, making her way to arid Las Vegas for her health.
Valley Cheese & Wine and Wonder Woman’s Next Act
“The next step is always just like the exact right thing,” says Brier. “It’s always cheese showing itself to me; it’s always like when I’m looking, when I’m feeling down, the hand that’s reaching out to me.”
Brier’s initial Las Vegas employment was with a cheese distributor, and she was also toying with making her own cheese. “I had found an investor,” she says, “but then it was a bunch of men I had never met in meetings deciding my future, and that didn’t seem right to me either.” She was familiar with Valley Cheese & Wine through her distribution work, and it was a fateful stop there just as Brier was beginning to doubt she could stay in Vegas that cast the next lifeline. “I just came to get a bottle of wine and the owner asked what was going on with me,” says Brier. “And I said, well, I think I have to leave Las Vegas because there’s just not enough cheese here. And she said, ‘I can’t believe you came in today, I just decided to sell the shop.’”
Brier took the reins of Valley Cheese & Wine mid-pandemic, nonetheless transforming it during a difficult period to a thriving business and a culinary destination. While Las Vegas would seem like an odd choice for a dedicated cheese professional, given its lack of resources for a local cheese industry, Brier maintains that it is exactly where she needs to be. “Cheese has not taken off the way here that it has in the West Coast, but I moved here with the idea that it’s going to be me, I’m going to do it,” says Wonder Woman…I mean, Brier. “When you think of Vegas, like old school Vegas, it was like a $7.99 steak and eggs town. This was never a culinary capital of the country. But right now you’re having all of these really interesting chefs who care about those farm to table movements and that accountability and that sustainability. It’s no longer just a food cost town. So as that mindset has sort of started to shift, there’s a little bit of room for cheese to wiggle its way in, and I fit here perfectly.”