A PILGRIMAGE TO
Oxford County’s Cheese Trail provides cheese lovers a look at the past and a taste of the present
The Oxford County Cheese Trail highlights its cheesy history with small-scale cheese makers, a cheese museum, farmers markets, restaurants, shrines to giant cheese wheels — and one particularly productive dairy cow.
The trail, a self-guided tour through the county, is about a 90-minute drive southwest from Toronto, and encompasses the city of Woodstock and its surrounding rural towns such as Ingersoll, New Hamburg and Bright. There’s no linear path, and visitors should make their to-do list beforehand on the trail’s official site. For an extra $5 and $7 per person, respectively, cheese makers Gunn’s Hill Artisan Cheese and Mountainoak Cheese offer pre-booked, guided tours of their facilities. It’s worth it just to see the aging rooms. Sundays are not an ideal day to visit as many of the shops and producers are closed.
I first heard about the cheese trail two years ago from the owners of Ingersoll’s Local Dairy. I’ve wanted to make the pilgrimage ever since. So with my gaga-for-Gouda friend Ryan at the wheel, we packed a cooler in the trunk of the car and started our Cheese Trail at Mountainoak Cheese in New Hamburg.
It’s early on a Saturday morning and Mountainoak owner Adam van Bergeijk takes us into the small plant behind his retail shop.
Here the milk is separated into curds and whey, pressed, dunked in brine and then stored in an awe-inspiring (and chilly) room where some 3,500 wheels of Gouda are rotated every few weeks to ensure even aging.
The van Bergeijk family came from Holland in 1996 to run a larger dairy operation and make Adam’s awardwinning Gouda using milk from the dairy farm’s 220 cows. “We know our cows; what they’re eating, how they’re treated. It’s how you get quality cheese,” he says.
At the end of the tour we sample the Farmstead Gold, a 20-month aged Gouda with notes of caramel that has won a slew of national and international awards. There are also a dozen or so flavoured Goudas including a slow-burning chili pepper, wild nettle Gouda that tastes like cheesyonion bread, and smoked cumin, which is a classic Dutch cheese flavour. Two days after our visit, van Bergeijk would go to England for the International Cheese Awards, and win two golds in the best Canadian cheese categories.
About a 30-minute drive away is Gunn’s Hill Artisan Cheese in Woodstock. Owner Shep Ysselstein opened Gunn’s Hill in 2011 so he could work close by his family’s dairy farm.
“Like beer, there’s been a shift away from the big (companies) and back to the small cheese makers,” he says, explaining the new crop of cheese makers in Oxford in the last five years. “Cheese is always popular, but people now want something more specialized.”
Among the cheeses Gunn’s Hill makes are brie, cheese curds and limited-run experimental flavours (customers can vote in a Facebook post for a new flavour — bruschetta cheese won the latest poll). Musttries are the flagship Five Brothers cheese, similar to a Swiss Alpenzeller with a sweet and full-bodied flavour — amazing in a grilled cheese — and the award-winning aged Handeck that has a slight nutty taste. We picked up a block of each.
Oxford County’s cheese industry was at its peak in the late 1800s when about half of Canada’s 200 or so cheese factories were in the county. Then smaller dairies shuttered as larger cheese companies captured much of the market.
But one of the original factories from the halcyon days of Oxford County cheese production is still going strong: Bright Butter and Cheese. The province’s oldest cheddar factory, it has been in its original location since 1874. Its cheddars are mainly sold in surrounding towns of Southwestern Ontario, so we had stop in to pick up a brick of old cheddar.
By now, our cooler is filling up so we head to the Ingersoll Agricultural and Cheese Museum for a free selfguided tour of cheese history. The small museum is packed with century-old cheese making equipment and paraphernalia. The highlight is a replica of the 3,300-kilogram cheese wheel that made the county famous worldwide in 1866. Not to be outdone, in nearby Woodstock there is a statue of the Springbank Snow Countess, a champion Holstein Friesian that produced 4110 kilograms of butterfat in her lifetime from 1919 to 1936.
There is an adorable cheesethemed playground behind the cheese museum, but don’t be like me and bruise your arm while hanging off of a giant slice of Swiss cheese.
We cap the tour at Upper Thames Brewing Company, Woodstock’s first craft brewery which opened last summer. Since Ryan is the driver, he enjoyed the live music while I downed a flight of five-ounce samples including a light blond ale and a chocolate stout that Gunn’s Hill uses to make a stout-soaked cheese. I regret not picking up a few bottles from Upper Thames’ bottle shop but with a cooler of a dozen or so cheeses, we left with a taste of Oxford County that’ll last weeks. karonliu@thestar.ca