The Art of Business
Blessed are the Cheesemakers
by Brian K.Mahoney; photos by Megan McQuade

Legend has it that cheese was “discovered” by an unknown Arab nomad. This nomad supposedly put his supply of milk into a pouch made from a sheep’s stomach, and set out across the desert.
The enzymes in the lining of the pouch, known as rennet, combined with the heat of the sun, caused the milk to separate into curds and whey. The nomad, unconcerned with technical details, found the whey drinkable and the curds edible. Cheese was born!

Today, cheesemaking is a huge industry. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, 8.13 billion pounds of cheese was manufactured in the us alone in 2001, using more than one-third of all milk produced in the us. The vast majority of this cheese is mass manufactured in factories, yet in the past 10 years, an artisanal cheese movement has blossomed in the us, led by cheesemakers in Vermont and California.

Jennifer Ippolito is a believer in the power of cheese, especially cheese produced in small batches by local farmers. She grew up in the Dutchess County town of LaGrange where her childhood home was sandwiched between Karl Ehmer’s cattle farm and the Sprout Creek dairy farm. In April of 2002, Ippolito turned her love of cheese into a business, opening The Cheese Plate at the Water Street Market in New Paltz.

When asked why she opened a cheese shop, Ippolito, a pretty woman in her late thirties with salt and pepper hair and a disarming, self-deprecating laugh, replied: “I’ve been cheese-obsessed my whole life. That’s why you do this. It wasn’t really about the business, it was about the cheese.”

The 9/11 terrorist attacks also played a part in Ippolito’s decision to open her business. Ippolito and her husband Bill, and their two children, William and Oscar, were living a block south of the World Trade Center at the time of the attacks. After 9/11, they bought the first house they saw in the village of New Paltz. (Bill still commutes to the city.)

Ippolito was attending about the New York Restaurant School at the time; she dropped out right before her externship was to begin. Staying in school after what happened just didn’t make sense to Ippolito. She opened The Cheese Plate soon after, though she had her misgivings. “I never thought that I knew enough about cheese, or that the we had enough money, or that the timing was right,” said Ippolito. “But after the Trade Center, you take any risk and you don’t think it’s too big.”



Cheese-related merchandise—picnic baskets, cheese knives, cheese boards, fondue pots, prepared food from local farms, etc.—is displayed for sale around Ippolito’s store, on shelves and display tables, but the focal point is two refrigerated glass cases in the middle of the store. Inside the cases are the approximately 50 cheeses Ippolito stocks at any given time. Imports are on the right, like Morbier, a semi-soft, unpasteurized, cow’s milk cheese from France. Morbier has two layers, bifurcated by a thin strip of (flavorless) ash in the middle, separating the cheese made from the morning milking from the evening milking. Ippolito claimed that cheese connoisseurs can tell the difference between the layers, as the morning cheese has a more intense flavor due to higher fat content from the fresher grass that the cows eat on an empty stomach.

(Cheeses that are produced in the spring and early summer, when the grass is green, are generally considered better then those produced any other time of year because the spring milk is so fresh and alive with nutrients. These cheeses are then aged and released in the fall and winter.)

The emphasis is on domestic, however, and Ippolito usually has about 30 domestic cheeses at any one time, which she buys directly from the producers themselves, who ship it to her via ups. “The reason I’m heavy on the local stuff is because I feel that that’s more important,” Ippolito said. “I have the imported because people like their Stilton—they ask for things and I bring it in. I take requests all the time. If I could do only local, I would, but it’s hard.” (Ippolito imports cheese with the help of a distributor, but she is traveling in March to the French cheesemaking center of Bordeaux to meet with an affineur—a cheese ager—and shortly thereafter hopes to begin importing directly from European producers.)

Ippolito features about a half dozen New York State cheeses, like Nettle Meadow Farm goat cheese from Warrensburg, Northland Sheep Dairy raw sheep cheese from Candor, near Ithaca, Popovich mozzarella and smoked mozzarella from Pine Plains, and cheeses made by nuns of the Convent of Sacred Heart at Sprout Creek Farm in LaGrange, next door to where Ippolito grew up. (The Sprout Creek Farm Ouray, a soft-ripened cow cheese from the nuns’ own herd of grass-fed Guernseys and Jerseys, is Ippolito’s best seller.)

The atmosphere in the shop is informal yet rigorously ordered—France meets Martha Stewart, with an emphasis on subtle pedagogy. Ippolito and her staff know their cheese and communicate that to their customers. “We’re a place you can go and taste,” said Ippolito. “You’re not going to buy something you’ve never heard of if you don’t taste it first. We try and give as many details about the cheese as we can. It’s not like a deli where people come in and say, ‘Give me a half a pound of ham or something.’”

The shop also has a wide variety of cheese options—you can buy a platter of cheese for $100 or stop by for a cheap lunch of cheese, fruit, and baguette.

This month, The Cheese Plate is expanding into a store space next door (when I visited Ippolito, her new space was strewn with half-opened boxes of merchandise and exposed wiring). The expansion will feature upscale kitchen supplies, like the porcelain enameled cast iron cookware of Le Creuset. When asked why she was moving into hawking kitchen supplies, Ippolito answered plain economics. “I needed to get more cheese-related things that could hold up the whole cheese habit. That’s why we had to expand—to support cheese.”

Ippolito knows that a good businessperson shouldn’t be too consumed with their wares as anything other than product—x number of units to be sold at such and such a price to achieve a certain margin of profit. But she can’t help being infatuated with cheese. “I have a very bad cheese habit,” said Ippolito. “You’re not supposed to be in love with your product. You’re supposed to have some objectivity. But you know what? If you love it enough, it’ll work.”