Vella cheese culture
August 2001 - Alaska Airlines Magazine
The Vella Cheese Company, in Sonoma, California, is a rare 13-person family business in a land of cheese megacorporations. At 72, Ignazio “Ig” Vella runs the place in his rubber boots, white T-shirt, trademark suspenders and paper cap. He works every part of the floor every day. Sometimes he works with the cheese makers in the early morning, then greets customers at the counter in the tiny shop, and finishes his day in the small office.
The Vella plant in Sonoma and their two new plants in Oregon carefully churn out a total of more than a million pounds of their 20 to 30 different cheeses every year, selling them across the United States. As Vella says, “Wherever there’s a niche for our kind of cheese, they find me.”
Vella tells me his story over a big hunk of cheese at a marble-slab picnic table behind the small factory. Vella makes a variety of cheeses, headed up by his Bear Flag Traditional Dry Jack which, at seven months, has a wonderful nutty flavor and a Gruyere-like texture, and at two years becomes Parmesan-solid.
Vella’s father founded the company in 1931, when Ig was a mere four years old. Vella stays close to his cheese-making roots, yet at the same time he continually pushes for improvements. In 1998 the company revived one of its original cheeses, Mezzo Secco, in response to customers’ requests for a softer version of its Dry Jack cheese. Digging through his notes, Vella found his father’s version of Mezzo Secco, then had his “culture people” re-create the original recipe.
He tried a vat-full, liked it, had some mold hoops made for larger-scale production and people have been enjoying it ever since.
In 1999 Vella bought two cheese plants in Oregon the Rogue River Valley Creamery in Central Point and the Rogue Gold Dairy in Grants Pass with the 10-year goal of restoring the plants and “bringing Oregon blue cheese back to glory.” Today, the Oregon plants combined produce around 300,000 pounds of blue cheese.
Now only two years into his plan, Vella is close to reaching his goal: His Oregon Blue Vein Cheese took sixth place against 25 other United States-produced blues in this year’s Wisconsin-sponsored U.S. Cheese Championships. Then in Madison, Wisconsin’s World Cheese Championships, two separate batches of the same blue such a new product they barely made the 60-day minimum aging period took 11th and 20th places in a field of 65 blues from around the world.
Tasting is believing, so I treated myself to a sample of Vella’s Oregon Blue Vein Cheese. It’s crumbly, yet still deliciously creamy, with plenty of great blue-cheese zing. It can stand proudly next to its European cousins.
-Joe Ray
