How America’s Best Cheese Is Made on a Wisconsin Family Farm

Uplands Cheese’s award-winning wheels start with a single herd of cows, acres of fresh pasture, and the dedication of two families carrying on a legacy.

Uplands Cheese has won national cheese awards. In the fall, when the cows switch from fresh grass to hay, the creamery uses the cows' richer, fattier milk to make its Rush Creek Reserve cheese. Kevin J. Miyazaki

If you’re a serious fan of American artisanal cheese, you’ve likely eaten, or at least heard of, Pleasant Ridge Reserve from Uplands Cheese. This hard, alpine-style cheese is made from raw milk from cows that eat only spring and summer grasses from a single farm’s pristine fields. The cheese is then washed in brine and aged for at least nine months (and as long as two years for the Extra-Aged selection).

It has quite the resume: Best of Show in the American Cheese Society (ACS) annual competition three times (2001, 2005, and 2010), and Champion at the 2003 U.S. Championship Cheese Contest—the only cheese to ever win both national awards.

At the root of this most awarded American cheese is a story of wisdom and tradition, love for the land, and the family farm.

The farm’s cows graze on fresh pasture all summer long in a rotational grazing system that’s good for the animals, the land, and the resulting cheese. Courtesy of Uplands Cheese

Birth of a Cheese

Pleasant Ridge is a geographical formation just north of Dodgeville, Wisconsin, amid the rolling hills of the Driftless Area, land untouched by the last advances of glaciers. Along this ridge sits a 500-acre farm and cheese company co-owned and managed by Andy Hatch, Scott Mericka, and their families since 2014. But they carry the torch of the previous owners and founders.

Back in the early 1980s, Dan and Jeanne Patenaude began to feed their cows using rotational grazing, moving them periodically to fresh paddocks—fenced-off sections of pasture—throughout the grazing season, a practice that benefits the animals’ diet and health and allows the plants and soil to recover as well. Jeanne’s brother, Bill Murphy, an agronomist and author of “Greener Pastures on Your Side of the Fence,” had long been a proponent of the practice, and the Patenaudes were early adopters.

In 1994, the Patenaudes and fellow farmers Mike and Carol Gingrich pooled their resources and bought the current farm together, to merge their small herds and manage the cows in a seasonal, pasture-based system.

The creamery crew, including head cheesemaker and co-owner Andy Hatch (center). Kevin J. Miyazaki

“They realized that the milk coming off of fresh pasture has so much flavor and such a different flavor than when cows are eating stored feeds,” said Mr. Hatch. “So they asked themselves, ‘What’s the best way to take advantage of that flavor?’ They looked at Old World cheesemaking traditions that have been based on pastured milk.”

In 2000, Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Patenaude founded Uplands Cheese. Working with local cheesemakers and cheese scientists at the Center for Dairy Research in Madison, Wisconsin, they chose to model their cheese after an aged alpine cheese. For centuries, alpine farmers would send a shepherd with their animals up into the mountains to graze during the summer months while the farmers made hay down in the valleys. The milk’s flavors were tied to the land and season, and the cheeses developed as a way to preserve summer milk.

In 2001, only one year after first making a batch, Uplands won their first Best of Show award at the American Cheese Society competition. The high quality and value meant they could hang their hat on that one cheese. But as Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Patenaude entered retirement, they needed to find someone to buy them out, someone who could be entrusted with their treasured creation.

Rush Creek Reserve, only available in the fall and winter, is akin to a savory, spoonable custard. Courtesy of Uplands Cheese

Changing of the Guard

The most recent USDA agriculture census (2022) counted 1.9 million farms and ranches, down nearly 7 percent from 2017. The American Farm Bureau Federation noted that around 1.3 million farmers are at or beyond retirement age, while fewer than 300,000 were under the age of 35.

Andy Hatch, who is now in his 40s, started at Uplands Cheese as an apprentice in 2007. Scott Mericka was hired three years later as herdsman.

“I knew I wanted to buy this farm,” said Mr. Hatch, “but I knew I couldn’t run it alone.” When Mr. Mericka answered an ad and came out to the farm,the two hit it off.

Though Mr. Mericka grew up in a white-collar household, his grandfather and uncles farmed in North Carolina, and he’d wanted to farm since his youth. He attended an agricultural college in North Carolina and was milking cows in California before he came to Uplands.

The cheese is made in a traditional open vat. Courtesy of Uplands Cheese

Mr. Hatch was a city kid who grew up in suburban Milwaukee, but as a teenager, he developed “a farming fantasy,” he said. His parents had lived in France and Switzerland and were pretty serious about cheese.

“My first real love was farming, and I wanted to find a way to have a dairy farm,” he said. He studied dairy science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then took a job with a corn breeder. His employer’s wife, a Norwegian woman from a cheese-making family, lost her elderly father, leaving her mother all alone with a goat dairy on the side of a fjord. Mr. Hatch went to Norway to help out.

“So I first learned to make cheese from a little Norwegian woman in her 70s named Uni,” he said. He was hooked, and spent the next two years working around Europe as a cheesemaker’s apprentice.

After adding rennet to fresh pastured milk, the resulting curd is cut with wire harps. It is then stirred and cooked for more than an hour, pressed to squeeze out the whey, and at the final step, formed into wheels. Courtesy of Uplands Cheese

When he returned to Wisconsin, he set his sights on Uplands because it reminded him of the places where he’d worked in Europe.

“What a rich life it is,” he said, “to be connected to soil and animals and farming on the one hand, and connected to people in cities who are interested in flavor and whose lives are more like mine was growing up.”

Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Patenaude, Mr. Hatch, and Mr. Mericka ran the place together for four years, but actually taking the big leap to purchase was “pretty daunting,” said Mr. Hatch. “We didn’t have any family money or investors. It was kind of a character loan from the local bank.” But Mr. Hatch and Mr. Mericka “stepped right into the shoes of Mike and Dan” with the same arrangement: Two families with 50-50 ownership of everything—the farm, land, and cheese business. The Merickas manage the herd; the Hatches produce the cheese.

The fresh wheels of cheese are rubbed in dry salt, which helps to both flavor and preserve them. Courtesy of Uplands Cheese

Back to Basics

Mr. Hatch understands the recipe for their success: “It was a hit parade, not because [Mike and Dan] were genius cheesemakers. They weren’t. I’m not,” said Mr. Hatch. “But when you use unpasteurized milk from a single herd of cows ... On fresh pasture, you’re always going to get cheese that’s more expressive of its place—a land and animals.”

Feeding an animal constantly on fresh pasture is “as old as rain,” he said. “That’s how bison move through the Great Plains or grassland animals migrate through Africa: moving through a grassland and eating the feed when it’s most nutritious, fertilizing it as they go.”

After dry salting, the wheels are regularly washed by hand with a brine solution inoculated with curing cultures. Courtesy of Uplands Cheese

It’s also about the cows. Every farmer does some version of improving the genetics of the herd.

“We’ve mixed nine different breeds together over the years. There’s a lot more diversity out there than you’d see on most farms,” said Mr. Hatch. This is a closed herd: “Any cow that’s milked here has been born and raised here.” They acquire semen from bulls in mountainous regions of France and New Zealand, not animals here in the United States, which are usually breeds accustomed to standing in a barn and eating a grain-heavy diet.

Additionally, the seasonality gives the cows a break: They aren’t milked in the winter. They have calves in spring, just in time for the fresh grass, and are milked only until Christmas when they go dry.

The Test of Taste

But how do these strict methods present themselves to the consumer? Shannon Berry, former chef and cheesemonger, and now an American Cheese Society Certified Cheese Professional® working for Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin, has tasted Pleasant Ridge Reserve “thousands of times” and praises the artisanship.

“Every wheel of cheese is from a different day and a different pasture,” she said. She compares the cheese to wine. “The weather absolutely affects how the milk turns out because it affects how the grass turns out. So if you have a dry year, the cheese is going to taste different than if you have a wet year.” Sometimes those differences are subtle, sometimes not, but there’s no denying the effects of the terroir. She describes flavor notes of chicken pot pie, spring onion, and a mushroomy umami.

“The cheese really picks up the flavor of the pasture,” she said, noting wildflowers and grassy notes as varied and complex as the plant life of the fields themselves.

A Second Cheese

In the fall, as the cows transition to a winter diet of hay rather than green pasture, the milk has a richer fat content that isn’t suited for a lean, hard, aged cheese. Rather than sending the autumn milk out to make curds, Mr. Hatch developed Rush Creek Reserve in 2010. It’s based on a classic French cheese called Vacherin Mont d'Or, which is also made in the fall and winter months.

“It’s the other side of the coin from the summer grass-fed milk,” he said. A spruce band contributes woodiness, and yeasts and molds on the rind generate additional flavors. Available from October through Christmas, Rush Creek resembles a brie wheel and is so soft at room temperature that you can eat it with a spoon.

“It has the same goal of reflecting the character of the farm, but it’s just refracted through a different prism,” Mr. Hatch said.

The Future

Mr. Hatch and his wife Caitlyn have a son, 12, and daughter, 10, while Mr. Mericka and his wife Liana have two sons, 7 and 8. The wives have their own endeavors—Caitlyn is an artist; Liana, a nurse—and the kids have school, but in the spring and around the holidays, it’s “all hands on deck,” Mr. Hatch said.

When pressed about the future, he says the kids love getting involved now, but they also want to go live in New York or Los Angeles. Whether they’ll come to share their father’s appreciation for a life between the rural and the urban and take on the reins of a family farm, only time will tell.

“That’s the kind of thing they might not appreciate until they’re older,” Mr. Hatch said. Some things need a bit of time to age.

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.