ITALIAN CHEESE
flourishes under the Tuscan sun
For thousands of years, Pecorino di Pienza has been produced the same way — but that might be changing
I’m not saying I drank too much Brunello di Montalcino. But if I had drunk too much Brunello di Montalcino — the Podere Le Ripi 2014, for example, at, say, 2 a.m. — then a hot, dusty barn packed with sheep wouldn’t have been my first choice of places to be at 6 a.m.
Yet there I was, surrounded by a hundred little animals, white wool coats matted down with hay and dirt, making small, timid bleats as they trotted past me up the ramp to the milking station. As the sun rose, rivers of dust filled shafts of light; you could sense the day was going to be scalding by breakfast. But for now, in the barn, it was bearable — just me, a young farmer named Giulia and a herd of sheep ready to be milked.
I was at Podere Il Casale, an organic farm outside the tiny Renaissance-era Tuscan town of Pienza, to educate myself on the intricacies of the town’s most famous commodity, pecorino di Pienza. You have likely heard of pecorino — but the town, not so much. Outside of Tuscany, it’s possible the only place you would hear the word Pienza is at a gourmet cheese counter.
“Pecorino is poorly understood,” said Matthew Rubiner, the owner of Rubiner’s Cheesemongers & Grocers in Great Barrington, Mass., and a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of all things cheese. “People assume all pecorino is pecorino Romano — which is very salty and more of a cooking cheese. But that image is seared into the minds of even my most food-conscious customers. So I don’t call it pecorino — I say it’s a sheep milk cheese from Italy. And as soon as we stock it, we sell out.”
Standing there watching a steel device milk the sheep, I didn’t consider myself one of the people Rubiner was talking about. I spend part of every evening eating cheese. I’ve sampled hundreds in my life. But I would learn my palate is not a sophisticated one. I would learn my palate is akin to a kindergartner. With a head cold.
“To make a great pecorino, you must know what your sheep eat, how they live,” Giancarlo Floris explained a few days later. Floris is the owner of Caseificio Piu, another organic farm, home to 1,400 sheep and some of the most celebrated pecorino di Pienza. He moved to Tuscany from Sardinia when he was only18. “Half of my sheep eat wild herbs; their milk is very strong. Half eat planted grains so their cheese tastes softer. A great pecorino should always taste different.”
Floris, a bald man with the trademark tan of a farmer, a thick black goatee and a curiously crisp white T-shirt, led us to the highest point on his farm. The Val d’Orcia, which cuts through the southern half of Tuscany, unfurled before us like an endless straw blanket, crunchy and suffocating in the summer heat. In the distance, fields punctuated with freshly baled hay, orchards of olive trees and growling tractors churning up the land, filling the air with dust, turning light to haze. Despite all the glossy marketing of recent years, Tuscany is, first and foremost, farm country.
“Fifty years ago, no one wanted to be in the Val d’Orcia,” said Paolo Coluccio, a renowned chef and the owner of Gusto E Evoluto, a company that organizes tastings and culinary tours. He had brought me to Caseificio Piu to introduce me to one of his favourite cheese producers.
Coluccio offered some background: In the 1960s, young Italians left here to get jobs in the cities; large swaths of southern Tuscany were effectively abandoned. Meanwhile, Sardinia was teeming with farmers. The Italian government offered huge Tuscan parcels to Sardinians for almost nothing. In exchange, the Sardinians, like Floris and his father, brought their skills — and their sheep — and began working the land.
I asked Floris how many pecorino producers there are in the Val d’Orcia. He started counting on his hand. “Twelve,” he said, pausing. “But maybe 20.”
The Val d’Orcia, a UNESCO Heritage Site, is Tuscany at its Tuscaniest. I started coming here in 2004 — at first with my boyfriend, many more times once he became my husband and then with our children. In the past 14 years, I’ve seen changes. Design hotels, Michelin-rated restaurants, high thread counts — the Val d’Orcia has become a place people (including me) come to get married or go on their honeymoon or go truf- fle hunting. In fact, while I was standing on this hill, Edward Norton was likely asleep at his villa — he was staying one hill over from us. And Wes Anderson was renting the palazzo at the bottom of our dirt road. That’s Pienza now: equal parts Edward Norton and sheep.
According to the farmers I met, the secret to their product is the unique combination of Sardinian sheep and Tuscan grass: wild fennel, clover and “these pastures are full of absinthe,” one farmer told me with a wink, referring to wormwood, the infamous herb that is a primary ingredient of the liquor.
“Maybe you love it, maybe you hate it, but pecorino should always surprise you,” Floris told me. “Supermarket cheese will never surprise you.”
We had moved into the tasting room. Floris was slicing off pieces of a “pecorino stagionato” — pecorino di Pienza aged at least six months. It was salty and earthy, delicately crumbly — and served by a passionate, fast-talking man who revered the process of making this cheese as much as its history. I may have been eating the perfect food.
Unlike Parmigiano-Reggiano or mozzarella di Bufala, pecorino di Pienza does not have its own DOP (Denominazione di Origine Protetta, or Protected Designation of Origin), and is therefore not protected. In other words, any sheep cheese made nearby can be labelled pecorino di Pienza.
“A good pecorino should be sweet even if it’s mature,” said Gian Maria Menta, the owner of Romeo Formaggi di Menta Gian Maria e Gionata, a famous cheese store in Piombino, who had come with me to the farm. Menta and I walked through the dank cantina of Cugusi, past shelves of gran riserva, which are turned twice a day to prevent mould.
“We don’t want to get bigger,” Cugusi said. “We want to make a quality pecorino.” To these artisanal farmers, the two are mutually exclusive. “My father moved his family here in 1962. The Val d’Orcia has gotten richer but the environment hasn’t changed — we protect the land, we don’t use chemicals, the shepherds respect the countryside.”
As in any industry, there is competition — but not between the farmers.
“The French sheep are a problem,” said Michael Schmidig, the son of a local farmer, talking about another breed that has showed up in the valley recently. “They produce three litres of milk a day. They eat grain and live in a barn. Sardinian sheep produce one litre. They eat grass, they need fences. The French sheep milk is not nearly as good, but you don’t have the problem with wolves.”
Braendli moved here from Zurich in 1991 and has been making pecorino di Pienza since 2003. (“Let’s say it wasn’t so legal before that.”)
I asked him if the unseasonably hot summer had any effect on his trade. “The plants are going crazy; they don’t know what’s happening. When a clover has made a flower, the pasture is over — it’s the end of the season. Our clovers bloom at the end of May. But because of the change in climate, our clovers are blooming a month earlier. And now we have hail. We never had hail before.”
It’s a jolt for a cheese that is “one of the oldest in the world,” Rubiner told me. “What makes this cheese so special is that it’s impossible to replicate elsewhere. Pecorino di Pienza is sweet and complex and it’s reinforced by the emotional attachment to the beautiful place it comes from. It has a story.”
It’s the story of an ancient cheese made by people from another place. Cheese that has been produced the same way for thousands of years. But that may not always be the case. The climate is changing. The big factories are moving in.
And the French sheep are coming.