Judy Schad's farm is located in a region called Kentuckiana. Rather than the cornfields of Northern Indiana, with their slant toward Chicago, the topography here is rolling and hilly, and the closest city is Louisville. There is a sense of the gracious South about the farm; Judy, in her cheesemaking coat and farm slacks, met us wearing a strand of pearls.

A writer and former doctoral candidate in Renaissance literature, Judy approaches cheesemaking with the whimsy of a poet and the rigor of an academic. She began to experiment with cheese in 1982, after discovering that she didn't like to cook with the milk her goats were producing. (The Schads moved to the country in 1976 to get back to the land, and since their property held a barn, they bought livestock to fill it.) Once she'd mastered the techniques of fresh cheeses, Judy became interested in aged ones, fiddling around until she'd found flavors and textures that she liked. She studied various techniques and traveled extensively, learning to work with different bacterias and molds and forming her own preferences for their results.

In the late 1980s, she became friends with a small group of women cheesemakers who were scattered across the country but united by their common love of goats and cheese. These women included Mary Keehn, Jennifer Bice, Ann Topham, and Mary Doerr; they traded experiences and offered each other advice, meeting at conferences and organizing cheese-related trips. In an interview for Laura Schenone's book, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, Judy likened their relationship to the early history of cheesemaking, "We had to talk to each other. There was no place in the United States to go and learn. You had to figure it out by trial and error. We just threw out a lot of cheese."

In the process, they honed their skills and created a vast array of distinctly American cheeses. Judy's cheeses alone include more than a dozen varieties, spanning the palate from mild to pungent. Their rinds vary from softly wrinkled to washed; their textures range from creamy to firm. While the fresh chevre is made from pasteurized milk, the aged cheeses are often made from raw. Two cheeses incorporate bourbon: the Bourbon/Chocolate Torta and the Banon, which is aged in bourbon-soaked chestnut leaves.

Like many cheesemakers we've met, Judy is eager to share both her cheese and her knowledge. When we visited, she greeted us with a cheese plate that included wedges of Banon, Piper's Pyramide, Sofia (a ripened chevre marbled with ash), Old Kentucky Tomme and Mont St. Francis, complemented by the delicious tang of pear mostarda and strawberry balsamic compote. As she's learned about cheeses, Judy's also learned about pairings, and Capriole offers a smattering of her favorite accompaniments, with recommendations for serving them with cheese.

In fact, everything at Capriole is in service of the cheese. And rightly so. More than anything else on our visit--more than Judy's amazing hospitality, more than her husband's wine cellar, more than the woods or the goats or the Bulgarian interns--it's the cheese that stands out in memory. The slightly grainy paste of the Sofia, wrapped in its soft, gray speckled coat. The white round revealed beneath a flower of chestnut leaves and the liberal splash of bourbon across the palate with each firm bite of Banon. The strange alchemy of the mouth that shifts the Mont St. Francis from nose-curling pungency to a mellow memory on the tongue. These are the fruits of Judy Schad's labor, and they are worthy of her efforts. —MMH