DAVID GREMMELS and Cary Bryant could be considered the accidental cheese makers.
Three years ago they were scouting for blue cheese to stock a wine bar they planned to open in Oregon when they happened on Rogue Creamery in Central Point, which had been making a Roquefort-style cheese since 1957. They tried it, they liked it and then the 75-year-old owner, Ignacio Vella, dropped a bombshell: "Gentlemen, if you want my cheese, you're going to have to make it yourself. I'm going to close it down."
They "bought on a handshake," Gremmels said, and within two months were up to their elbows in curds and mold. Vella, whose family also owns the well-regarded Sonoma company that makes Dry Jack cheese, stayed on to teach them (he's still officially master cheese maker). Soon Bryant was putting his microbiology degree to work tweaking Rogue's recipes, one for Oregon Blue Vein that was brought by Vella's father from France and the other for Oregonzola, named by Vella's daughter for his variation on the Italian original. Every year since, Rogue has been steadily developing new varieties of blue with character all their own, cheeses that are American to the nubbly core but are racking up awards even in the land of Stilton.
And Rogue is just one of the many artisanal cheese makers now churning out blues that hold up against or even surpass the European classics.
Simultaneously creamy, crumbly, sweet and salty, these new blues are anything but an acquired taste. They're sophisticated and nuanced but still accessible. You can eat them on a cracker or showcase them in recipes, and always you get unique flavor, mellow but sharp, with all the hallmarks of a superb Burgundy. They even seem to induce wine-speak, with aficionados finding hints of berries and caramel and hazelnuts in a single buttery bite.
Like all the great pungent, veiny cheeses, the new Americans go with everything you want to eat right now: pecans and pears, apples and walnuts, cranberries and bitter greens, grilled beef and roast pork, even pasta and polenta. The flavor, the texture and the creaminess harmonize with nearly every other brink-of-winter ingredient, and that's before you even get out the Port.
A category of cheese essentially dominated for 64 years by Maytag Blue out of Iowa now includes variations from coast to coast: from California to New York and Massachusetts, with stopovers in Colorado and Louisiana and Vermont. \o7Terroir\f7 is a pretentious word, but tasting these cheeses can give you a hint of how connected the Oregon grass the cows eat is to the Crater Lake blue you spread on a sliced baguette.
