You once said that you’d like to run a “nice little self-supporting farm.” It’s become a bit more than that. What happened?

(Laughs) Its been 23 years so a lot has happened. I still like the concept of a self- supporting farm and we are, but what happened is I got involved with the goats and it became a more passionate pursuit and the goats led me to cheesemaking and that led me to being in a business, and its just gone from there.

You’re born and raised in Sonoma … how was it to find yourself in France for three months, working at chèvre producers there, learning the business? There had to be some culture shock on both sides.

In Sebastopol, on a turkey farm … I think goats were a step up.

I was the first woman that I knew of to do that, and they [the French] found it a little odd, but I was very earnest and I loved the animals and was very, very interested in learning how to make the cheese. The French are very used to a system called a stage, so that wasn’t an odd thing that someone would come to live with their family and work and learn. There really wasn’t a lot of culture shock because I was in heaven, living with these people whose lives revolved around their goats and while my life revolved around goats, too, I wasn’t making a living at it. But being there, becoming completely immersed in it was wonderful. I love the culture, the long meals, the discussions and all the different cheeses we ate. The whole rhythm of life there. It was what I wanted to do, and now I’m doing that.

When you started making and marketing goat cheese, what was the usual reaction?

The usual reaction was that I’d be standing in some market offering people samples and most of the people would not accept them. They would go, “Eeew, oh goats, no” or say “No thank you” and rush away. There were several years of that being the predominant reaction.

The people who had traveled, who had eaten goat cheese in France, were more likely to be open to trying it. But the common reaction was that it made people run, but I learned not to take it personally. It was a study in rejection.

Was writing the book American Cheese (with Linda Siegfried) in 1988 part of a plan to educate the consumer?

The Goat Cheese Cookbook, which I wrote earlier, was more about that. At the time that book was published I was the only one making goat cheese in this country, and Linda is a great cook. Alice Waters encouraged us because people were asking her about what to do with it [goat cheese] and I was getting calls. I was so busy making cheeses and managing goats and starting a business that I didn’t cook a lot. I would just go home and eat goat cheese. I decided that I needed a book that would give people some direction.
American Cheese came about because the publishers gave us a chance to do a second book, so we did, but the first one was more about educating the consumer about goat cheese.

How did you first meet Alice Waters?

I met Alice very early on, when I came back from France. At the time I was working to produce a cheese that I could eat … and when I got to where I was consistently successful I began taking it around to the various little cheese shops and sold a little here and a little there. A woman I was dealing with, Helen Allen, who, with her husband had a shop, said that she knew someone who would love this cheese. “Just trust me,” she said. “Just call this woman up and go see her.” So a month later I went to see Alice and she did in fact love – love! – the cheese.

I walked in the back [of Chez Panisse in Berkeley] with my little cheeses and she bought them on the spot. And she did, in fact, always order more in one week than all the stores bought. And then as her reputation grew and more and more people started to cook following her example, the restaurant use of goat cheese grew exponentially. And Alice still buys it every week.

You truly do like goats, don’t you? Is it true that you know them all by name?

Yeah, I do, all 500 of them. That’s the total herd, and out of that number we’re milking about 350 of them. Many of them were bottle-raised here from babies and they’re all unique. There’s something a little different about each one of them, and I have a lot of contact with them. I feel like a kindergarten teacher sometimes, knowing each one, and they all know me and the other people that work here with them. They definitely develop a relationship with people.

Someone once called your farm a “health spa for goats.” A happy goat makes good chèvre … is that the idea?

I think so. Yeah, I think it’s real important. About once a week we check all their hooves and see which ones need trimming or special attention. That’s kind of over the top, I guess. They all get vaccinated, of course, and shaved so they’re comfortable. And we feed them a special blend of alfalfa, oat hay, grain and mineral salt five times a day. We’ve also planted a pasture for them. Goats are natural browsers, they like to wander around and eat. Give them a big pile of feed and they get bored and will walk away from it.

Why are so many of the people – at least in this country – who are involved in your business, women?

You know, I used to have some researched, pat answers to questions, but I don’t really know the answer to this. I want to say that I think that more women are involved in goat cheese, in goat dairying, because at one time, 20 years ago, the goat was not so respected an animal – it may still not be – and most men would do something a little more manly, like having cows. And maybe my being a woman, and becoming known for having the goats and making cheese, gave other women encouragement.

I know there are men that do goat dairying as well but I think you’re right, it is mostly women. And we don’t have to compete with men.

You buy goat’s milk from other farms. Has that been a difficult system to start up, or did they come to you?

When this business started, having 30 or 40 goats seemed like a lot, but there was no real market for a little bit of milk like that. So pretty much everybody came to me. Even now there is still an ebb and flow in the supply circle, supply and demand. I have found that still, today, people decide that they want to get into the goat business, and suddenly there is more milk available. Then people get out of the business and there is less. But from the beginning, people were coming to me most of the time, especially when there was an excess. Right now, though, I think that everyone we have supplying us – twelve local family farms – came to us.

The term “farmstead” is now widely used. Were you one of the first producers to be referred to that way?

Yes, I think so. I started with just the goats on my farm, but pretty early on I started getting milk from other people. It sounds funny but it seems that I didn’t know anybody that didn’t have goats. So it was not technically farmstead at that point since some of the milk came from other farms.

Looking back over the last twenty-some years, what proved to be more difficult, educating the public or raising goats and running the cheese making operation?

You know, I don’t know that I looked at it as difficult, it was just what I did. I worked out of instinct. I loved the goats and that drove me to figure out what to do with the milk so I could afford to keep them. Then when the cheese caught on and the demand for the cheese increased, that provided the chance to buy more goat milk from all my friends. Then there was more demand and more producers to buy from. There are always difficult moments, but for the most part it was just “What’s the issue today.”

When I went out to educate, I was pretty evangelical. Not that I’m not now, but I think at the beginning there was a youthful fervor and enthusiasm about it at the beginning, and a need to educate because people did think it odd and curious and I kind of needed to prove that it was legitimate. I think that the most difficult thing was not being in the moment and worrying if this was a fad or was it real; was it going to stick or was I going to be out on the street in a year. I did think about that a lot at the time.

What wines do you think go best with goat cheese?

This is such a complex question. The traditional answer is Sauvignon Blanc, and that definitely works. Now there are so many types of goat cheese. Depending on the style, I like to have it with sparkling wines. I like Chardonnay, young, fruity Beaujolais or a light Pinot Noir with a young chèvre. As the cheese gets more complex I like a pretty powerful, complex red wine with some backbone, a Zinfandel or a Rhone-style wine. Sometimes even a Port is what you need. It is very hard to be general. Wines and cheeses both vary tremendously.

You’re getting close to producing a million pounds of goat cheese a year, which is a long way from when you made it out of your garage … is the demand continuing to grow?

If you average it out, over the last 23 years we’ve been growing at 12 to 15 percent per year, but you have to remember we started with very little so that wasn’t so hard to do at the beginning. And now it’s become a much more accepted and understood product. It’s more common and there’s more demand for it and more people making it. Even with all the people that are making it now, and with all the product that is coming in from around the world, everybody’s business is growing. That’s amazing when I think back to when I didn’t know if it was a fad or if it was going to be here today, gone tomorrow. It seems to have made a place for itself in the American diet …and I still love it just as much.