Wheels of fortune: Area cheesemaker medals twice at big competition

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Just south of Woodstock, known as Canada’s dairy capital, an artisan cheesemaker is churning the milk produced at the family’s farm into award-winning cheese.

Gunn’s Hill Artisan Cheese, owned by husband-and-wife duo Shep Ysselstein and Colleen Bator, has earned numerous accolades since they began the operation 13 years ago.

But the latest kudos – first- and second-place wins at the recent American Cheese Society’s 2024 awards – were especially uplifting, Bator said.

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“We’re very, very, very happy, and I think even surprised,” said Bator, who also works full-time as a high school teacher in the Norfolk County town of Delhi.

“We’ve entered a lot of competitions over the last 13 years, and we’ve been really lucky to win in a lot of the Canadian competitions, but this one’s quite big,” she said.

Gunn’s Hill Artisan Cheese’s Dark Side of the Moo, a cheese marinated in beer, won the flavour cheese category, and its Five Brothers came second in the washed-rind category, for cheeses periodically treated with agents to encourage the growth of bacteria to add flavour.

The American Cheese Society is an industry umbrella group, whose annual competition – kind of like an Olympics of cheese – was held in Buffalo, N.Y., last month. The winners receive no prizes, but the award medals are coveted for the industry recognition they confer.

“It was super-unexpected, and so it feels great,” Ysselstein said, sharing Bator’s sentiment.

The couple established Gunn’s Hill Artisan Cheese more than a decade ago after they met. Ysselstein had travelled extensively to learn the cheesemaking craft after becoming intrigued by the art on a trip to Thunder Bay when he visited a cheese factory in his last year of university, he said.

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“If that can work in Thunder Bay, that’s got to be able to work in Southern Ontario where there’s more people,” Ysselstein said.

The now 42-year-old took classes at the University of Guelph and University of Vermont, followed by a job in upstate New York, then ventured overseas to work in Switzerland and lastly in British Columbia before returning to Ontario.

But it was the summer he spent working in the Swiss Alps that “inspired a bunch of the styles of cheese that we do now,” Ysselstein said.

Ysselstein’s cheesemaking expertise, complemented by Bator’s background in education, has helped the business grow into what’s now an 11,000-square-foot factory, which can stock upwards of 14,000 wheels of cheese at a time.

“It’s just evolved as our company has evolved, and it’s been a really good coupling,” said Bator.

The milk that Gunn’s Hill Artisan Cheese uses in its products comes from Friesvale Farms, the Ysselstein family dairy farm about a kilometre away in Norwich Township. The dairy was started by Shep Ysselstein’s grandfather after he immigrated from the Netherlands in the 1950s.

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About 80 per cent of Friesvale’s dairy yield is sent to Gunn’s Hill Artisan Cheese, amounting to about 20,000 litres a week, which works out to about 100 wheels of cheese a day.

The cheese wheels are washed and aged on site, some of them for months or even years before they hit the market.

“Our Five Brothers, which is our most popular (cheese), we keep it for eight months before we sell it,” said Ysselstein. “We’ve got a harder, more aged cheese called handeck (and) we keep that for two years before we sell it.”

The company’s cheese can be found in 300 locations across Ontario in markets, grocery stores and other shops, Ysselstein said.

“We’re just focusing on making a style that’s less common, so we’re not making a cheddar-type cheese, for example, which is a lot more common, ” he said.

“We focus on the details, and that’s really what helps make our cheese special.”

bwilliams@postmedia.com

@BrianWatLFPress

The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada

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