A Vermont cheese course

A barn-hopping tour of the cheese makers of Vermont unveils a lifestyle that's alive and well and hundreds of years old. Many makers welcome visitors into their cheese rooms and barnyards, offering a rare window into the old family farm that once reigned here.

Arm yourself with a good map (DeLorme's Vermont Atlas & Gazetteer is one of the best), leave the main roads to the masses, and find your own back way along the capillary network of dirt roads that leads you through tunnels of trees and hugs the banks of squiggling rivers.

Peaked Mountain Farm is a bucolic dream high on a hill in Townshend. A flock of sheep rests in the shadow of a 100-year-old barn. A pond exhales morning mist beside the farmhouse. Three donkeys named Dis, Dat, and D'other offer a warm welcome.

Owner Ann Works hands us plastic booties, hairnets, and aprons to wear into her sterilized cheese room, which gleams with stainless steel -- a hermetically sealed anomaly built right into the barn. She coaxes a 75-gallon vat of buttery-smelling milk to a yogurt-like consistency with a mixture of heat, friendly bacteria, and rennet, the way cheese has been made for centuries.

According to ancient cheese lore, it all started when a nomad used a sheep's stomach as a canteen to carry milk. High desert heat, rhythmic sloshing, and the presence of rennet in the lining of the sheep's stomach processed the milk into a crude form of cheese.

Now some cheese makers make their own rennet, concoct their own bacteria cultures, and eschew pasteurization, opting for a product that's organic in every way. And every variation in ingredients and methods finds its way into the flavor of the cheese.

"You could give the same recipe to six different people, and you'll end up with six different cheeses," Works says as she hooks her finger into the curdled milk to determine when to cut it into small chunks, or curds.

Once the watery byproduct, or whey, has been coaxed out, she packs the curds into molds and weighs them down for several hours.

Later, they will wind up in the cave, a small, cool room where cheese begins the aging process. Rounds of Tomme glow softly on the shelves.