The Boston Globe has a feature story today about the latest fad in yuppie early retirement: cheesemaking.
I guess if you can’t retire to Napa or Sonoma to make wine, the next best thing is to retire to Vermont and make cheese. Maybe by the time I reach retirement age, there’ll be a vogue for owning cracker factories, hopefully in someplace with a better climate.
What’s amusing to me is the “driven to excellence” mentality that these yuppie cheesemakers can’t let go of, even as they are supposedly trying to get “back to a simpler life”. These people aren’t trying to blend into the New England landscape like so many merino sheep, they’re poseurs and wannabes. And, as I suspect they’ll learn the hard way, the market for artisanal cheese remains microscopic compared to other yuppie midlife fantasy businesses like wine. The article says that there are now more than 85 artisanal cheesemakers in New England (almost a quarter of the 400 artisanal cheesmakers nationwide), but you can count the high-end cheese shops on the fingers of your hands.
So maybe there’s the REAL opportunity, opening cheese shops rather than making cheese itself. Seems to me that there’s some magical ratio of cheesemakers to cheesemongers that has yet to be achieved. And personally, I would much rather spend my days sampling new cheeses with peckish Walpolling types than having my arms in vats of hot sour milk all day.
