Meadow Creek Dairy puts Grayson County on the artisanal cheese map

Meadow Creek Dairy, located in Southwest Virginia where the edge of Grayson County and the city of Galax meet, has been laboring quietly to turn out the perfect artisanal cheeses for 25 years.

Locally, they’re not a flamboyant presence; no cheese festivals, no public tours of the facility, no gift shop where you can buy cute ceramic cows and cheese gift baskets, or cafe with pricey gourmet melts. It’s family-run, small, and they tend to business competently and with minimal fuss. 

They have, however, won a long list of awards, which last year included a Super Gold designation at the 35th annual World Cheese Awards in Trondheim, Norway, one of 100 such designations.

Only one out of 100 doesn’t sound stunning, until you realize they went up against 4,502 cheeses from 43 countries. Their winning entry was the Appalachian cheese, the first they ever made, with its white outer penicillium mold and mild, buttery flavor. 

Thanks to the Feete family and their employees, you’ll never be able to look at individually wrapped supermarket “cheese food” slices the same way again. 

The farm is at the end of an unpaved driveway and isn’t picturesque so much as utilitarian (though inside, it’s pleasantly full of natural light). Depending on when you pull up, it’s quiet, the cows out to pasture and the Feetes and their interns and employees attending to business in the office, the shipping area, the cheese room or the caves. 

Kat, daughter of the owners and founders, shows up to lead the way. Mild-mannered and friendly but not given to superlatives or gushing, she’s the one who OK’d a visit and is willing to explain things with teacherly patience. 

Through a series of seemingly alchemical processes — that aren’t magical at all, but measurable by basic science — milk is turned into cheese here. The kind of patience required for this transformation seems to mark everyone at Meadow Creek with a gentle good nature and a quiet sense of humor. 

Nobody’s lazy, but everyone’s relaxed. There’s no making things go faster, or at least not without compromising quality. And if at the end there’s a bad batch of product, no tantrum will undo the damage. Thus, everyone conveys through their attitudes, there’s no reason to get upset. 

You need that patience and endurance to be a cheesemaker: patience to wait out the process of turning curds into wheels and wedges, and endurance to withstand the almighty stink of the process.

Helen and Rick Feete, Kat’s parents, came to the area from Northern Virginia and Maryland; in their lives before Meadow Creek, she was an office worker and he was a carpenter. 

They decided to build their venture in Grayson County back in 1987, since land prices were good and they liked the local music. “My father’s thing is,” said Kat, “we bring in the New York dollars, but we spend them in Galax.”

She and her brother, Jim, were raised locally, but traveled across the world for cheese shows. Both now married, their lives still vacillate between international dairy events and the bucolic routines of the farm. 

The cows are milked outdoors, New-Zealand style, and driven to whichever meadow is to be their feed for the day; Meadow Creek practices rotational grazing, which means they mostly snack on a part of pasture for a few hours, then get milked and turned out to another bit of pasture. Their grassy diet is supplemented with some grain. 

To travel between most areas indoors at Meadow Creek requires a pair of Wellingtons and stepping into and out of shallow trays of “quat” (quaternary ammonia), to kill off any invasive bacteria that could enter from without and ruin the cheese. (For similar reasons, almost everyone wears head wraps to keep hair out of the way.)

Kat heads for the nearby cheese room, which is where the cooking, aka the first part of the alchemy, takes place. Raw milk stored in nearby tanks is pumped into one or both of the large steel Dutch vats via overhead pipes, she explains. The procedure is a little different for each of the cheeses, but generally, it’s warmed in the vats and starter bacteria is added.

Then rennet, a coagulant, is also added and the mixture is cooked in the vats. Then it’s drained, pressed to get rid of further whey, cut according to the type of cheese being made, put into hoops or forms and drained and pressed again. This continues with occasional flipping to even out the texture, depending on the type of cheese.

The next day it’s brined, then allowed to dry for a day, then moved to the cellar.

The cheese room’s temperature is maintained at a mild, humid 70 degrees Fahrenheit or so, by dint of fans and vents whose airflow keeps condensation from forming and possibly dripping onto the proceedings below. You’d think with raw dairy products, the space would smell, but it’s just faintly milky in a wholesome sort of way.

(It’s worth noting here that Meadow Creek has to date always passed rigorous inspection from both the USDA — which is over the farm — and the FDA — which is over the dairy.)

The vats, whose outsides are encased in a carefully temperature-controlled “water jacket,” sit at the far end of the room. A series of long, rotating blades revolve slowly through them, stirring the current mixture of milk and starter and rennet, which is curding up. 

The dairy employs young people from an internship program based out of Ohio State University; most though not all are from Central America. They start their education in their home countries and spend a year at Meadow Creek on a student visa, learning hands-on, then take the knowledge back with them. 

Two of them, Ana Arguello and James Longanecker, are now working the cheese room, cleaning up, getting ready for the curds to be moved from the vats to a container that looks like a long sink, but is properly called a drain vat, via a flexible hose. Once begun, the process takes a few minutes.

Once they’ve been moved, they stir the curds by hand with an oarlike paddle, separating them from the whey, which is drained from the vat and into buckets. Fresh, artisanal cheese curds, if you were wondering, look like a combination of a separated cream sauce, cottage cheese and foam insulation.

More work has to be done to push as much whey from the curds as possible. While they’re still in the drain vat, flat metal plates are placed on top of them. The plates are themselves topped with the heavy, whey-filled buckets. Using the weight of whey to extract more whey is both ingenious and somehow humorous. 

Plastic hoops and muslin cloths are readied; the curds are cut into portions, packed into the hoops, wrapped in the cloths and stacked in a hydraulic cheese press to further rid them of liquid. The labor of this, which even after hundreds of years relies heavily on the use of human effort and wits, underscores the concept of “artisanal” in a way that all the talk in the world cannot. 

Everything being done partakes of a long tradition — the gentle good humor of everyone involved, the faint watery swish of whey, the stacked wheels of what will develop into cheese. The cheesemaking could be happening today or five hundred years ago, in Grayson County or across the ocean in a land whose borders have long since shifted.

It’s almost enough to make you ask if you could join the farm and become an intern, calmly stirring the curds yourself, awash in the diffuse light and camaraderie.

This fantasy comes to a screeching halt when the work before you is done and Kat leads you to the “caves,” also called cellars, which are underground, industrially kept rooms where the cheese ages, routinely getting flipped to keep its texture consistent. 

Ammonia reams your nostrils out like a blade. The smell grips you and will not let go until you flee upstairs again. If being spiteful on purpose had a smell, it would be the odor of handmade cheese ripening. 

The cheese started upstairs gets washed in a morge (pronounced “morj”) of water, salt and bacteria that creates a rind. Or the Grayson and Mountaineer cheeses do; the Appalachian gets sprayed with penicillium mold on the outside, which develops into a white fuzz. People with penicillin allergies can usually eat it — Kat’s husband, who has the allergy, can — but they don’t recommend it.

“It’s the penicillin rind,” said Kat of the smell, “it’s producing the ammonia. It’s obnoxious, and we’re doing the best we can, but it’s just a natural byproduct.”

She continued, “It’s older, it’s getting aged about eight months or more. That’s why the rind looks all raggedy and shaggy.” (It does, far more than it does when you buy it out in the world.) “They’ve basically grown a second layer of penicillin on top of the penicillin at this point. We just let it age until we wrap it. The penicillin stays. Isn’t the kind you would be allergic to, it’s a different variety. It also will not cure you of your infections!” she laughs.

The Grayson is aged for about 60 days, the big rounds of Appalachian for 90, and the Mountaineer for six months, because it’s bigger, 14 or 15 pounds, as opposed to the others’ square-wheeled weights, at about seven to eight pounds. 

The caves are named for the Marx Brothers, by the way; Harpo has mostly Grayson, Groucho mostly Appalachian. “We’re making the most Appalahcian right now, so Groucho fills up,” said Kat. 

The caves are full of uniform cheeses that please the eye (if not always the nose) and promise a future full of deliciousness. Odd to think how ephemeral the whole of this is, but it is, which was proven by a global disaster.

“It’s a little precarious, you know, especially for smaller cheesemakers,” said Kat of the business in general. “But we had the restaurant market.”

Then, of course, 2020 rolled around and COVID struck.

“It was April when I saw the real nosedive,” said Kat. “We lost 97% of our business that month.”

They managed to recover to a degree; by the end of the next month it was up to 50%. “People were starting to pick up, the grocery stores were figuring out what they could do,” she said. “We were at 30% total [business loss] by the end of the year, and that’s not nothing.”

Most of the cheesemaking community took a hit. 

“And we were one of the lucky cheesemakers, because our cheeses are aged,” said Kat. Aged cheeses meant that possibly by the time some were ready, the worst of the pandemic might be over — though for Meadow Creek, that only got them so far.

“I did end up throwing out inventory,” Kat said. “But if you were making fresh cheeses, which especially a lot of the smaller cheesemakers do, and the ones making goat cheeses, it was a loss. You can only keep it for about 30 days. You have that one month to try and recover and sell stuff out. A lot of people took a hard hit.”

Meadow Creek Dairy spent 2020 dumping good milk, because nothing could be done with it, and cows, whether their product is going to market or into the ground, need to be milked daily; it’s what they’re bred for. 

Additionally, small farms didn’t qualify for government assistance. “There were programs in place, but they only applied to people who were selling into the commodity markets,” said Kat. “If you weren’t, you didn’t get any government money for the milk you dumped.” 

Commodity specifically refers to selling the milk as it is into the market where it’ll be turned into a product sold by a larger company. “It has to move into the corporate structure, basically,” like selling it to a Kraft factory, she said. Smaller farmstead and artisanal venues like Meadow Creek Dairy, who operate independently from these systems, got none of those financial protections. 

“So it was a hard year for us to get through, but we’re a little older and we have a little more of a money cushion,” Kat said. “And we were able to salvage a lot of our cheese because we are longer-aged.”

The crunch meant several cheesemakers went under.

“We lost people,” she said. “There weren’t a ton of people around for cheesemaking in Virginia. The South, there’s not a ton of cheesemakers and then, you know, Virginia’s got some tight regulations — that’s fine, we’ve always been able to work with them. But it’s a hard business to get into. Rick [Feete, her father] says when my parents moved here in ‘88, there were 80 or 90 dairies in Grayson County, and now there’s three. We’re one of them.”

And lately, they had to dump five days’ worth of milk — raw dairy being especially dangerous to leave sitting around — due to Hurricane Helene, but thankfully their generator was running and kept 50,000 pounds of existing cheese at the correct conditions.

“We didn’t have any major infrastructure damage that would set us back, either,” said Kat. “It was no fun, but in the end, for us, it was a blip.” Many farms and individuals in Grayson weren’t so lucky; she expressed gratitude to have been spared the worst of it.

Their herd came through it as well. They have a closed herd, meaning it’s comprised only of cows they’ve raised, of which there are 135, New Zealand Frisian-Jersey hybrids. 

“We call them ‘the French girls,’” she explained. “It contracted a little in 2020, that big ol’ chasm in everybody’s lives. We did have to sell off some of the herd, and we’re working on building it back to about 150 over the next two years.”

In order to live out here and spend your days making cheese, you have to find such things absorbing, and not everybody’s cut out for it, as some interns have found.

“We’ve had two people, one from Houston, the other guy was from New Jersey,” recalled Kat, “and it’s funny; both of them were like ‘We’re so excited to be out of the city!’ and both of them after they got here a few months said, ‘This is awful.’” She laughed. 

“I like it, but you’re gonna have to accept there’s no night clubs. There’s three restaurants. I’m a homebody. For people like us, it’s like ‘Yes! This is my happy place!’ but if you’re used to a more social life, it’s hard.”

What to console yourself with if you discover that farm life isn’t what you hoped for? Well, obviously, there’s always cheese.

Cheese Sex Death, the Instagram account you didn’t know you needed if you’re a cheese-intensive foodie, ran a picture over five years ago of a be-ringed, long-nailed female hand holding a thick, inviting wedge of pale yellow cheese, appealingly riddled with small holes and encased in a light orange-ish rind. 

Captioned, “How do you pair a cheese that smells like feet, feels like custard, tastes like beef, and has a rind that crunches like it’s coated with sugar? Grayson from @meadowcreekdairy,” the entry was more than enough to make you want to roll right out to the nearest cheese purveyor and bite into a piece of said stuff as if into an especially juicy burger. 

Back in the office, Kat brings out a tray of cheeses for tasting: extra-aged Appalachian, Galax and, yes, thank heavens, Grayson. As she points out, Appalachian is somewhat like Tomme de Savoie or Toma Piemontese; Grayson looks like Taleggio (and is often displayed alongside it in cheese cases); and Galax is described as a soft, mild cheese, sort of like an Edam or Havarti.

Grayson is aged 60 days, Appalachian for 90 days, Mountaineer (not in today’s roster) for six months and Galax for at least two. 

Everyone’s favorite, or at least the one you hear the most about, is the Grayson, the one “Cheese Sex Death” took a shine to. 

It’s far and away the most pungent, remarkable in a lineup already so strong. Galax’s Chapters Book Shop, which carries a range of delicacies in their food and wine section, keeps the Grayson in a separate small refrigerator. If it’s opened, everyone in that half of the store immediately knows. If it’s left open, everyone in the other half knows as well. 

Grayson is the stinky cheese lover’s dream come true, and, if you can get past the olfactory assault, like eating the world’s most unctuous fudge, but made of beef, almost steak-like in its fatty density. Take one bite and your entire sensorium is occupied with the experience. 

As Kat points out, its flavor, like that of all Meadow Creek’s cheeses, changes with the seasons, because the cows graze rotationally in the farm’s pastures and the quality of the grasses they eat change as well. It’s a neat example of the French concept of terroir, how the conditions and season and territory a foodstuff is produced in affect its flavor and quality. 

“They produce lots of milk after calving in March, so there’s tons of it, but it’s not necessarily as rich,” she said. “And then in fall, you’ve got this ridiculously dense milk. And that’s partly because of the stage of lactation and partly because the grass is drier and denser. And so the cheese, too, is fattier and richer.”

She continued, “In the case of Grayson it’s most notable. In the summer it’s pretty light, actually, and very smooth-textured and with some mushroomy flavors, but by fall it’s very earthy and much more rich in a way people associate with washed rind cheeses.”

Following its flavor from spring to fall is like drowsing in a meadow, casually taking note of how the light and shadows change as the sun moves slowly from one side of the sky to the other. Each shift affects the experience, never quite the same from moment to moment. If wine is bottled history, cheese, with its shorter lifespan, is an edible memory from a private, blissful season.

“Here’s a young Grayson,” Kat said, pointing to a small piece. “It’s not going to be too crazy on you. This is the spring Grayson. It’s not even all that smelly. It stays pretty calm this time of year. It’s a little earthy.”

You can tell what it’s going to turn into, if you’ve had a Grayson that’s further on in the season; it’s like a very light Morbier or a very young Forme d’Ambert. 

Kat nodded. “You have that edge of earthiness and that texture.”

The inside of the cheeses variously have eyes and crystals; eyes are little openings, like the holes in Swiss cheese and are caused by bacteria, and crystals are made up of either tyrosine or calcium lactate (you might forget to ask which is which as you’re moaning around a mouthful of artisanal dairy product). 

And, counterintuitively, the pandemic gave them the impetus to create new products.

“In 2021, because we had some spare milk and we were struggling to figure out where things were going to go, we tried two new cheeses,” said Kat. These turned out to be Mountain Laurel and Galax. However, Mountain Laurel, with an 18-month aging process, is a “sideline” as she puts it, so much so that by now it doesn’t appear regularly on the website. 

“Mountain Laurel probably isn’t going to expand that much at this point because it’s an 18-month cheese and it takes a really long time,” she said. “When you find out 18 months later what you did wrong — it’s hard.” (By now it seems to have permanently disappeared.)

Galax has entered the regular roster, though, and it’s proven to be a winner, with some up-front fussiness that can be left alone once it’s in the cellar. It’s sort of a Gouda analog, but less sweet. 

“It’s done really well,” Kat said. “It’s a washed-curd style, with a mixed rind, so there’s a lot of skill that goes into it from a cheesemaking end, but once it goes into the cellars, it just kind of rides.”

Galax is a good cheese for someone who’s intimidated by (or grossed out by the potential funkiness of) artisanal cheeses. “It’s very smooth, it’s very mild, it’s very approachable,” she said. “It’s just a great cooking cheese, and we have a lot of fun with it. So we’re happy.”

On average, local family tables are more apt to have grocery-store American cheddar than gourmet cheeses, but that doesn’t mean Meadow Creek never puts in an appearance: “It’s been selling well locally,” noted Kat. “People like having a cheese that’s named after the city, and we did want to honor Galax.”

She adds, “You know, this has always been a good town for us, and we’ve always had a lot of support here. We were trying to keep the price down on it, because our other cheeses, the prices have just inescapably climbed between labor and the feed in the dairy. Grain, grass, hay for winter — everything just goes up and up. We tried to keep the price of Galax low so we have something that’s approachable for folks.”

The Appalachian is a sort of happy medium between the assertive pungence of Grayson and the agreeable mildness of Galax. It’s a slow-change artist in terms of flavor. Regular Appalachian is buttery and somehow manages to integrate a citrusy brightness (more so when young) to a dark, mushroomy note (more so when older). 

“Until we did Galax, Appalachian was our most approachable cheese,” Kat observed.

Extra-aged Appalachian is a deeper, more concentrated version of the same, like the difference between reading an accomplished author’s early work versus a later opus — an odd way to describe a dairy product, but absolutely apt while you’re tasting it. It has a bready sort of smell and could be described as if Parmesan was a soft cheese.

“This is what Murray’s picked up, and what the cheese crowd really wants to taste,” said Kat. “And it’s almost at the edge of having crystals. You taste that, how there’s almost a crunch? So in certain ways the texture isn’t as appealing, but that kind of crunch is considered a big plus mark in the cheese world.”

Back in the day, they sold locally and then on the East Coast alone. Now they’ve been picked up by distributor Murray’s Cheese, based out of New York, so they have a wider range. Their cheeses pop up to favorable reception all the way out in the West Coast. The cheese section of your nearest Kroger, which is stocked partly by Murray’s, will often have a Meadow Creek Dairy product or two in stock. Wegman’s carried a few, such as Appalachian, before the pandemic. 

However, they still wrap and ship cheeses from here and stepped up in 2020, doing a steady retail business. “It’s only a chunk of our income but it’s nice. We can sell directly to people and have a direct connection,” she said. 

There’s a little more time to sit and savor the cheeses and conversation — a consummate pleasure afforded everyone here almost every day. “I frequently have a piece of cheese with fruit and milk for dinner, because I’m lazy,” Kat smiled. Her husband and 12-year-old daughter frequently do the same.

It’s this very pleasure that’s ultimately the point of the work. Kat dislikes most commercial American cheeses; they don’t taste good to her, and seem to be more about getting certain standard elements of nutrition into a diet than anything else. 

“We use [our cheese] all the time in the kitchen,” she said. “We do a staff lunch, so we do a cooked old-school dinner in the middle of the day, a full farmhouse meal, and we use the cheese constantly there.”

The other standard American belief, that too much fatty dairy in your diet, doesn’t seem to hold here. Everyone looks naturally robust, healthy, glowing. Artisanal cheese must be very good for the mind, as well, because everyone also seems very happy. Is that the case?

Kat’s only answer is to laugh, popping another savory, unctuous morsel of cheese in her mouth. 

Meadow Creek Dairy is located in Galax and does not offer tours or an on-site store, but their cheeses are available through direct mail purchase and via retail, including grocery stores that carry foods through Murray’s Cheese. They are on Facebook at www.facebook.com/meadowcreekdairy and can be found on the web at www.meadowcreekdairy.com/.