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I’ve discovered that any good story, like a good joke, will involve three specific components. For example, jokes that start out with: “A Priest, a Rabbi and a Minister walk into a bar…” almost never disappoint, and stories that start with “Once Upon A Time” almost always have a distinct beginning, middle and end.

Every once in awhile, one stumbles into a room full of treasure without even looking. Good news, artisan cheese fans: today was one of those days, and you’re going to be the benefactor in a few months.

Without much thought and still talking about the new labels, I of course said yes. Before I knew it, we were walking through a huge walk-in cooler door into a sight that would have stopped Ali Baba in his tracks (and we didn’t even have to say “Open Sesame”). What appeared (cue the archangels chorus here) was amazing: a long row of bandaged Cheddars, in several different states of aging, lining a 40-foot long aging cellar. Yes, folks, 40 feet of bandaged Cheddars that until today, no knew existed except the Meisters.

The Meisters are calling this new cheese Scottsdale Reserve, named after Scott and the river dale they live in (I had to look it up – a dale is a valley). Scott didn’t have any of theses cheeses cut up for sale yet, and I wasn’t about to ask him to cut into a giant 42-pound top hat for a mere cheese blogger to try, so the jury’s still out on this one. But, based on Meister’s track record for high-quality gourmet cheeses, this one will be a winner as well.

This week, my soon-to-be-14-year-old-daughter and I went on what I like to call “The last mother/daughter road trip before my daughter starts to hate me because she’s a teenager and I’m her mother.”

The Wisconsin State Fair has been conducting a Blue Ribbon Cheese & Butter Auction ever since I can remember, but this year was the first time I was invited as a potential bidder with my Wisconsin Cheese Originals organization.

I’d never been to a cheese auction, and in good faith, packed my checkbook in my purse. I figured how hard would it really be to bid on and win a chunk of cheese?

Um, yeah, it turns out my pockets were not nearly deep enough for the high-paying crowd at the Wisconsin State Fair. A total of 17 different blue-ribbon cheeses put up for auction by the State Fair Dairy Promotion Board (it uses the money for scholarships and such) brought more than $28,000 – a new record.

Yes, that’s right. 17 wheels of cheese = $28,000. You do the math. That’s some SERIOUSLY expensive cheese.

The thing one realizes quickly at a cheese auction is it’s really not the price per pound that counts, it’s how many pounds you’re bidding on. For example, four pounds of Sid Cook’s blue-ribbon Casa Bolo Mellage went up for auction, compared to 40 pounds of Monterey Pepper Jack by Lynn Dairy.

Before I left, my husband informed me that my auction budget was $500 (me thinketh I may have purchased one too many designer bags lately), so I was thinking, hey, I can probably at least get four pounds of cheese, right?

Wrong.

Sid Cook’s Casa Bolo Mellage cheese went for $230 a pound. Yes, that’s $230 PER POUND. I stopped bidding at $125/per pound after my husband kicked me under the table. The next cheese I bid on was Limburger by Chalet Cheese. I figured I had a fighting chance to buy a stinky cheese, but no. It went for $150 a pound. Again, I stopped at $125, due to the aforementioned kicking.

The Grand Champion cheese, a Rosemary-Olive Oil Rubbed Asiago, made by Mike Matucheski at Sartori Foods, went for $127.50 per pound. Times 20 pounds, that’s a rousing $2,550 for a wheel of cheese. And people complain to me that artisan cheese costs too much in the store. Yeesh.

Before the bidding started, my friend Norm and I were trading auction stories. I told him my father once brought home a load of wooden ladders from a farm sale that he bought by mistake after waving hello to a friend. He tried to pass them off as something we really needed, but we eventually got the real story out of him.

Norm said he had an uncle who viewed auctions as a social gathering, and who always bought something whether he needed it or not, thinking it was worth the price of admission for a good show.

In the end, Norm and I both went home cheese-less. Oh well, there’s always next year. I’m thinking I just may send the Dairy Promotion Board a check anyways. It was a pretty good show.

There’s nothing like feeding a crowd 10 beer, cheese and chocolate samples to really get people in a good mood.

This year’s keynote speakers were Temple Grandin, a professor at Colorado State University, renown for her ability to work with animals and who has changed the entire landscape of livestock handling and welfare. She spoke at 11 a.m. to a full-house tent. Sunday’s keynote speaker was Michael Perry — one of my very favorite authors — you absolutely must read his new book, “Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting”.

I basically just show up, cut some cheese, drink some beer, and talk for a few minutes about each cheese. It’s a pretty good gig. This year, I didn’t even have to cut the Limburger – I somehow managed to outsource that job to Missy at Organic Valley. She cut 10 bricks of the stinky cheese by herself. Outside in a tent. In July. In 85-degree weather. This woman deserves a medal.

Sand Creek is making some exceptional beers, and Mark really does a nice job of pairing them expertly with Wisconsin cheeses. Here are a few of my favorites:

Sand Creek’s Oscar’s Chocolate Oatmeal Stout, paired with Limburger. I’ve never had a beer with chocolate and oatmeal in the name before, but this one was really good. A 2000 World Beer Cup Gold Medal winner, the smoothness of this beer nicely complimented the full-flavored Limburger. I had to reassure the crowd that Limburger’s bark is worse than its bite, and most people took the plunge and tried this pairing. It also helped it was the last pairing of the day, right before the Raisin Cookie Dough Truffle, and it always helps to bribe people with chocolate.

Bad news has a way of traveling quickly, so when I heard the news last night that Agriculture Secretary Rod Nilsestuen had died in a tragic drowning accident, I was absolutely devastated. This was a man for whom I worked, for whom I had fought for, and whom I would have followed to the end of the earth. And for those of you who know me, you know I’m not much of a follower.

It’s not often one gets the chance to see hand-stretched mozzarella being made, so when Cesar Luis called me last week and asked me if I was interested in helping him make string cheese, I cleared my calendar, threw my boots in the car, and told my daughter we were going to make cheese.

Whoo-hoo! Road trip!

We arrived at Sassy Cow Creamery, a a farmstead dairy between Columbus and Sun Prairie, about 10:30 a.m., just in time to suit up and help Cesar cut the curd of his vat of fresh mozzarella cheese. We used stainless steel knives that Cesar made himself, a sign of things to come during the day.

You see, Cesar and his lovely wife, Heydi (who at five feet tall, and no more than 100 pounds, can seriously kick my ass when it comes to lifting cheese), recently purchased and installed a 2,500 gallon cheese vat at Sassy Cow. A couple days a week, they make fresh cheese curds for Sassy Cow to sell. The rest of the time, they make authentic Hispanic cheeses.

And when I say they make cheese, I mean they actually make it — by hand. They cut the curd by hand with their own stainless steel knives, they mill the curd by hand (as in cutting up big slabs of curd with cutting knife on cutting boards), pile the curd in tubs by hand to cool, stretch it by hand into 15-pound, 50-foot ropes of mozzarella cheese (one batch at a time), and then cut and package each batch by hand to sell.

In short, they do a lot of work that involves a lot of bending, huffing, puffing and lifting cheese in a room that’s hot enough to make sweat drip off the end of your nose. And they seem to really, really enjoy it.

Cesar’s been making cheese since he was seven years old, when he learned the art from his grandmother in Mexico. Today, he makes the same cheese in very much the same way, only he does it with state-of-the-art stainless steel equipment and electricity.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the stretching of the mozzarella. Once the curd is milled and put into tubs, Cesar fills up the cheese vat with about 4 inches of hot water that is 180 degrees F. He dons three pairs of gloves, and then proceeds to put his hands into this water, hand-rolling, molding, forming, and finally stretching mozzarella cheese into long ropes.

Let me just say that this process is a) very hot and b) a helluva lot harder than it looks. I watched Cesar do the first batch with what I thought was little effort, and then got up the courage to don my three pairs of gloves and tackle the next batch.

What happened next is pretty aptly pictured to the right: me trying to lift a really heavy rope of cheese, stretch it at the same time, and watching Cesar try very hard not to laugh.

This is why I write about cheese, not make it. And if nothing else, I serve as comic relief to cheesemakers. It’s all good.

While Avery and I only spent about six hours making cheese with Cesar & Heydi, they spent a total of 12 hours making 250 pounds of hand-stretched mozzarella. We left around 4:30 p.m., and walked out of the make room to a standing-only sized crowd of people waiting to buy their string cheese.

Word had gotten out that Cesar & Heydi were at Sassy Cow that day, and people were going to wait as long as it took to buy their cheese, because yes, it really is that good.

That afternoon, we ate hand-stretched mozzarella that we had helped make, and it tasted even better than usual. Food has a way of meaning more when you know where it comes from, and when you know the sweat and soul the maker puts into it, it’s pretty special. So the next time you see a package of string cheese with the label, Cesar Cheese, snatch it up. It may cost a little more, but it’s worth its weight in gold.

One Saturday a month, the kind souls at Fromagination, a cut-to-order cheese shop in Madison, Wis., let me come in for a few hours and play cheesemonger. I get to interact with customers, talk about Wisconsin artisan cheeses, and even fumble my way around cutting and wrapping cheese. Great fun.

Alrighty, now that I’ve reclaimed my blog from a comment-crazy person suffering from the Dunning–Kruger effect (sorry folks – had to turn off comments on my blog for awhile), it’s time to update you on the Wisconsin Buttermaker License situation.

Exciting news, fellow cheese geeks: a 2011 Portrait of a Wisconsin Cheesemaker wall calendar featuring 12 artisan cheesemakers in America’s Dairyland will debut this fall.

Two weeks ago, photographer Becca Dilley and I hit the road for a five-day field trip, shooting photographs of 12 cheesemakers in five days. Over 1,000 miles later, we finished with an amazing array of cheesemaker portraits, each stunning and different. (That’s us, above, being eaten by friendly goats at Diana Murphy’s farm).

Becca will have the final shots to me in a couple of weeks, and then graphic designer Mauro Magellan will work his magic on putting together the actual pages. The end result will be a Wisconsin Cheese Originals calendar available in September, retailing at $19.95 at select gourmet specialty food and cheese shops, as well as online, and at the Second Annual Wisconsin Original Cheese Festival in Madison this November.

Here’s a sneak preview of the 12 cheesemakers and the text I just finished writing for each:

January – Joe Widmer
Entering Widmer’s Cheese Cellars in the tiny town of Theresa, Wis., is like stepping back in time. “Very little has changed in the 80-plus years that my family has been making cheese here,” says Joe Widmer, a third generation cheesemaker. Joe prides himself in combining modern science with Old World art to hand-craft two of the best-known cheeses invented in Wisconsin: Brick and Colby. He’s the only cheesemaker still making Brick cheese with bricks, and one of a handful still crafting Authentic Colby with an open curd texture. His award-winning cheeses are evidence of his “take no shortcuts” motto.

February – Willi Lehner
He’s been called an “off-the-grid rock star cheesemaker” by the New York Times, profiled as a “local hero” in Saveur Magazine, and captured on film yodeling in his underground cheese cave, but Willi Lehner doesn’t let such accolades go to his head. A cheesemaker in the truest sense of the word, Willi relies on intuition and innovation to make some of the best hand-made cheese in America. You’ll find him every Saturday, rain or shine, at the Dane County Farmer’s Market in Madison, selling the fruits of his labor: the science and art we call cheese.

March – Chris Roelli
It took nearly a year for fourth generation cheesemaker Chris Roelli to perfect the recipe of Dunbarton Blue, one of the best and newest Wisconsin Original cheeses. One bite of this open-air cured, earthy cheddared-blue will make you glad he took his time. Imparting the feel of an English cheddar, but spiked with the delicate, subtle flavor of a fine blue, Dunbarton Blue is named after a neighboring local township between Shullsburg and Darlington, Wis. The cheese is handcrafted in small batches and aged in the family’s historic aging cellar, where it ripens to perfection surrounded by a rock wall foundation.

April – Katie Hedrich
Ever wonder what an aspiring cheesemaker looks like? Look no further. As the face of the next generation of Wisconsin artisan cheesemakers, Katie Hedrich was the 2010 recipient of Wisconsin Cheese Originals’ annual $2,500 cheesemaker scholarship. Katie and her family plan to build a farmstead cheese plant on their home goat dairy farm near Chilton, Wis., and in 10 years, she hopes to be the first female Master Goat Milk Cheesemaker in Wisconsin. You go, girl.

May – Andy Hatch
If what Uplands cheesemaker Andy Hatch says is true — that half of the secret to making Pleasant Ridge Reserve is simply getting out of the way of the milk and letting its unique properties and flavor profile shine through – then many would argue the other half to the secret of this near-perfect cheese is Andy Hatch himself. Andy joined the Uplands Cheese team near Dodgeville, Wis., in 2007, and with Mike Gingrich, continues to craft the one farmstead cheese that first put the Wisconsin artisan cheese community on the map. Made only from milk when the farm’s dairy cows are grazing on fresh grass, Pleasant Ridge Reserve can be found in nearly every specialty cheese shop and four-star restaurant in the country.

June – Gerald Heimerl
One family, one herd, one farm. The cheeses that come from Saxon Homestead Creamery in Cleveland, Wis., all start with the milk of one herd of cows who graze on fresh grass in the summer, and eat preserved grass and hay in the winter. Gerald (Jerry) Heimerl, his wife, Elise, along with her brothers and their families, today manage the Saxon homestead farm and nearby creamery, a tribute to their ancestors who emigrated from Germany in the 1840s. Saxon cheeses, such as Big Ed’s, Green Fields, Saxony and Pastures, reflect the different seasons in the herd’s diet. Jerry calls it “flavor by nature.” We call it “really good cheese.”

July – Diana Murphy
Diana Murphy and her family started with just a few goats. But, as goats will do, two goats became four goats, which became eight goats, and soon, a “herd” was producing more milk than the family could use on their small farm near Cross Plains, Wis. Diana began experimenting with making different goat’s milk cheeses and found that fresh goat cheeses complimented her skills and the milk. She set out to get licensed as a cheesemaker and completed the two-year process in 2004. Today, Dreamfarm supplies goat’s milk cheeses for Vermont Valley Community Farm, a CSA supplying fresh fruits, vegetables, and now fresh goat’s milk cheese to families across Wisconsin.

August – Brenda Jensen
Brenda Jensen never planned on being a cheesemaker. Sure, she could blame her husband, Dean, for bringing home the first 50 sheep (or as she calls them, “the ladies”) five years ago to their farm near Westby, Wis. But once she got her hands on the milk, she wanted to make cheese. Today, Brenda is recognized as one of the best sheep’s milk cheesemakers in the nation. Her hand-made Driftless cheese, named for the farm’s location in the “Driftless” part of the state – is soft and creamy and crafted in a variety of seasonal flavors with ingredients sourced locally. Her hard sheep’s milk cheeses, including Ocooch Mountain, is a mountain-style, raw-milk cheese aged 3-4 months.

September – Bruce Workman
Bruce Workman has the distinction of being the only cheesemaker in North America making “Big Wheel Swiss. “ His Edelweiss Emmentaler, crafted in a historic cheese plant near Monticello, Wis., is made using raw milk and a traditional Swiss copper vat. Each wheels weighs about 180 pounds and ages peacefully in the company’s cellars in Monroe. Edelweiss partners with a cooperative of dairy farmers dedicated to pasturing cows to bring a pure but complex flavor profile to a line of cheeses made from pastured milk. Soon, his Edelweiss Emmentaler will be made only from the milk of these grass-fed cows, earning Bruce yet another distinction: grass-based cheesemaker.

October – Sid Cook
If Master Cheesemaker Sid Cook at Carr Valley Cheese in LaValle, Wis., was required to wear every medal, carry every trophy and don every ribbon he’s ever won for making specialty cheeses, he wouldn’t be able to move under all the weight. Clocking in at more than 200 national and international awards in the past five years alone, the man officially is a cheese genius. As the inventor of at least 50 American Original cheeses — meaning he simply made them up – it’s sometimes challenging to keep up with all the new cheeses Sid dreams up. But we keep trying.

November – Myron Olson
In its heyday, cheese factories in Green County, Wisconsin, produced nearly 3.8 million pounds of Limburger a year. Today, one factory is left: Chalet Cheese Cooperative, home to the last remaining American manufacturer of the granddaddy of stinky cheese. And nobody knows Limburger better than Myron Olson, who’s been making it for 40 years at Chalet. While production is down to about 700,000 pounds a year, demand remains steady. There’s even talk of a stinky cheese comeback. Just last year, Olson resurrected Liederkranz, a long-lost cousin of Limburger, and orders for the new stinky cheese are strong. Looks like this is one Wisconsin tradition not ending anytime soon.

December – Gianni Toffolon
Surrounded by thousands of wheels of American Grana in the aging rooms of BelGioioso Cheese near Pulaski, Wis., cheesemaker Gianni Toffolon says he never gets tired of breathing in the deep, nutty aroma of aged Italian cheeses. Gianni came to America in 1979 with BelGioioso founder Errico Auricchio to start making authentic Italian cheeses in Wisconsin. More than 30 years later, he’s helped the company win nearly every major national and international award for the company’s line of specialty and artisan cheeses and has set a standard of excellence in the industry.

Stay tuned for details on when and where you can get your copy!