by Sophia Stern
Open the fridge in a typical American household and you’ll probably find cheddar in the cheese drawer. Most of us know cheddar as a rindless rectangle wrapped in plastic. However, cheddar’s original form is pretty unfamiliar to American cheese culture. Traditional English cheddar is made in huge cylinders and gets snugly wrapped in a cloth bandage. For this week’s pairing, we’ve chosen a domestic cheddar inspired by this tradition, but with several other distinct features. Not only is Bandaged Bismark clothbound and cave-aged, it is also made with raw sheep’s milk and aged beneath the streets of Brooklyn in New York City.
In what was once a 19th century brewing cave, Benton Brown & Susan Boyle now run Crown Finish Caves. Crown Finish is a cheese aging facility operating 30 feet below Bergen Street in Brooklyn. The cave is loaded with wooden shelves, stacked to the brim with around 28,000 pounds of aging cheeses. Except for a few Italian cheeses made from water buffalo’s milk, most of the cheese at Crown Finish is made on farms in Vermont or Upstate New York. Experienced dairy farmers with land and facilities make fresh wheels of cheese, known as green cheese, and send the wheels down to Brooklyn where Brown, Boyle, and their small team attend to the laborious process of aging their collection of different cheeses.
Bandaged Bismark is a reflection of the Northeast’s rich dairy traditions. This cheddar starts with sheep’s milk from an Amish dairy farm in Upstate New York, which is then sent to the cheesemakers at Grafton Village Cheese in Vermont. At Grafton, the accomplished cheddar makers turn the New York sheep’s milk into cheese. Once ready for aging, the young wheels are sent down to Crown Finish, where they descend below the streets to be clothbound and aged on wooden shelves for four to six months. The bandage introduces a complex flavor to the cheddar, capturing the microbiology of the cave and imparting flavors of earth and minerality. The sheep’s milk itself is buttery and floral, with distinct herbaceous notes and a slight tartness on the finish.
Sheep’s milk can be tricky to pair, but the cheddar of it all offered a clue. Since chardonnay and cheddar are a classic pairing, we chose Beaune 'Clos du Foulot' Monopole from the Baptiste Guyot winery. This young wine, entirely made from chardonnay grapes, has a distinct green apple acidity, along with surprisingly strong notes of butter and oak for a 2020 vintage. As the cheese is more buttery than tart, the acid in the wine brightens the cheddar and draws out the cave-aged minerality from the rind. Although cheddar and chardonnay are both familiar faces, this pairing highlights the unique features in both the wine and cheese without compromising on their classic comfort.