By Mackensy Lunsford
Photos By John Autry
"Terroir" can be translated as "sense of place." Used most often to describe the effects of the growing environment on wine grapes, terroir seems just as appropriate a word to use when considering the goat’s milk cheeses made at Spinning Spider Creamery.
The Marshall dairy is a hilly, five-acre plot, a rumpled blanket of wildflower-covered pasture populated with goats, chickens and the guard dogs who keep them from becoming meals for the local coyotes. The goats, vigorous and well fed, amble about the steep terrain, nibbling on fresh hay, sipping on clear water. Cheese maker Chris Owens believes whole-heartedly that these conditions are made evident in the flavor of her product.
Owens, along with two of her three boys and husband Jeff, lives in an A-frame house perched on one of the few pieces of flat land on this property. Just a stone’s throw from the house sits the cheese kitchen, a mostly stainless-steel affair, much more of a laboratory setting than the passionflower vine-covered exterior would suggest. It is here that Owens spends most of her time—at least when she is not home-schooling Morgan, 10, and Sylas, 15. The boys take occasional breaks from their schoolwork to milk the does, and it is this milk that becomes some of the best artisan goat cheese in Western North Carolina.
In the gleaming kitchen, Owens lovingly crafts a variety of cheeses that extend leagues beyond your average chevre in the realms of flavor and texture. The bloomy (a pretty word for mold-ripened) cheeses begin their lives in the thermometer-crowned pasteurizer, born from a commingling of perfect temperatures, rennet (a curdling agent) and the precise bacterium culture for the desired flavor.
The results are cheeses like the Camille, Spinning Spider’s own creamy version of Camembert, or the award-winning apple wood-ash dusted Stackhouse. The process would seem like magic, were it not for the fact that every detail is carefully controlled—it is truly a study of chemistry and biology. When Owens speaks about cheese and the bacteria that is integral in its creation, her inner biologist shines through.
"You promote different bacterial growth with different temperatures," Owens explains of the process. "Different types of molds are happiest with different temperatures. Swiss types like higher temperatures, for example. You just have to know what you are trying to bring out, trying to repress—it’s knowing the chemistry of the milk, the chemistry of the bacterium and what are you looking for flavor-wise at the end."
A 300-gallon vat dominates the center of the room. It is here, Owens might argue, that the real magic occurs. This giant mixing tank is where the raw-milk, aged cheeses are created, cheeses that are "near and dear" to Owens’ heart. Here the aged cheddars and fetas begin their lives, as do the Swiss-like nutty Liesel and Spinning Spider’s own Black Mountain blue cheese. For now, the giant mixer is silent, its contents having been formed and stowed away to ripen in the "cheese cave"—a climate-and-humidity-controlled walk-in cooler redolent with the distinctive aromas of goat milk and age. It is a scent that true cheese lovers would adore.
For all of the apparent sophistication of the operation, Owens speaks of the start of the dairy in the bemused tones of someone who’s stumbled on a great idea and watched it take on a life of its own.
At the age of nine, the Owens’ eldest son Cullen—now 19—was given a goat named Bluebell to raise and breed for a 4-H project. Bluebell, of champion lineage, begat Silverbell and Snowbell, and eventually a little herd of champion goats was prancing about the verdant hills of the Owens property. "Suddenly you have a show herd, and you’re milking five goats, and they’re all giving a gallon a day, you’ve bought an extra fridge, there are five gallons in it and you haven’t even milked yet!"
The glut of goat milk, not to mention the fact that the two younger boys in the family are lactose intolerant, seemed to naturally lead to cheese making. As the herd grew, the Owens family began to run out of family members willing to take in the cheese overflow. Thus, Spinning Spider Creamery was born.
That original herd is now more than 100 healthy animals strong. They always have hay, grain and fresh water, and the hills that they walk keep them toned and healthy. "They don’t just loaf around the barn," Owens says, "they move. I think as a result they’re healthier, instead of being confined with their feed always in front of them and never having to do anything but eat and make milk." It is this lifestyle, along with the fresh mountain air—not to mention the skill of the family that tends the flock—that makes great milk. As Owens says, "This is the framework that Europeans define as terroir that allows us to produce award-winning artisan cheeses."
