GRANVILLE, Vermont (AP) -- The biggest investment Daniel Hewitt made on his sheep farm was a cheese plant that features a tasting room with a view -- visitors can watch the art of cheesemaking while sampling his European-style tommes and blue cheeses.
Hewitt's Three Owls Farm is located in the heart of the Vermont cheese trail, where artisan cheesemakers welcome visitors to their dairy farms in hopes of educating customers about their craft and drumming up business.
"It's important having people know where their food and local cheeses are coming from," Hewitt said. "The more educated people become about their sources of food, the more likely we'll get good food, I believe."
Visitors drop in from Boston, Quebec and New York. Some have downloaded the cheese trail map from the Internet; others wander in. When they time it right, they get to see cheesemaking. Other days, they can see the animals and sample the cheeses.
At Three Owls Farm, visitors can pay $250 to be a cheesemaker for a day -- a hands-on experience that includes milking the sheep.
"There's nothing like tasting the products, to sell people on them," said Jonathan Wright, of Taylor Farm in Londonderry. "This is one place where people can really come and see the process of cheesemaking, they can see the animals, they can make the real connection to how these products are produced."
Before the cheesemakers developed the trail, Vermont already was on the map in the cheese world.
The state has the highest number of cheesemakers per capita, said Catherine Donnelly, co-director of the Vermont Institute of Artisan Cheese in Burlington.
They produce more than 100 kinds of soft and aged hard cheeses using milk from cows, goats, sheep and water buffalos.
Most are made from raw milk rather than pasteurized milk, which cheesemakers say is more flavorful. And from farm to farm, the flavors and textures vary like wine.
"Taste can be altered by the temperature of the room in which you're working, the size of the holes in the mold in which you drain the cheeses, just the bacteria that are in the milk from your farm," Hewitt said.
That flavor earned Cabot Clothbound Cheddar -- produced by Cabot Creamery and Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro -- best in show at the American Cheese Society's annual competition in July.
Zabar's, the famed New York food emporium, sells maple smoked gouda from Taylor Farm, cheddars from Cabot and Grafton Village Cheese Company, and a variety of cheeses from Blythedale Farm in Corinth and the Vermont Butter & Cheese Company in Websterville.
"We have a lot and more to come as they continue to make fabulous cheeses," Olga Dominguez, the store's cheese buyer, said of the state's cheese producers.
This year, Hewitt is focusing on a Pyrenean-style tomme, which is a cooked, pressed, slightly rubbed rind cheese. The cheese has been aging since May, when the sheep were first milked after grazing on grass.
"Basically you try something one year, see how it worked, try something the next year and see how it worked, and just keep working at it like that and in 300 years we'll be just like the Italians," he said.
Serge Roche, a French chef who sells Vermont cheeses at his Three Clocks Inn and the Village Pantry in South Londonderry, expects the progress to be quicker.
"Vermont could become the Napa Valley of the cheeses, there's no question about it," he said.
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