BURLINGTON, Vt. - At the age of 48, Bob Works came to an enviable life junction. The real estate investment firm where he was partner went public, and his payout was sizable. He could have stayed with the firm, managing properties such as One Winthrop Square and State Street Bank building in Boston, or not worked another day of his life.
Instead, he and his wife apprenticed at a cheese-making farm.
Nine years later, they have their own farm and turn out 6,000 pounds annually of a Pyrenees-style cheese that is sold at niche markets such as the Concord Cheese Shop and South End Formaggio.
"We didn't want a dissipated life of playing golf and drinking too much," Works said. "We wanted real careers. We wanted to reinvent ourselves."
The Works are part of a growing group of established careerists who are stepping off their professional ladders to learn such skills as tending goats and decanting whey. Some had never so much as milked an animal, and many were solidly urban creatures with only romantic notions of one day working the land.
Now, they are crowding into cheese-making schools.
"I can't even tell you how many people I've had who say, 'I used to be a lawyer, and now I am a cheesemaker,' " said Ricki Carroll, owner of the New England Cheesemaking Supply Co. in Ashfield, Mass., which offers basic cheese-making classes 12 times a year. Her waiting list has 200 names, and this year, Carroll expanded her class size from 28 to 40 and once again is offering classes off-site, including on Cape Cod and in Pennsylvania.
At the four-year-old Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese at the University of Vermont, where students study "Cheese Chemistry" and don hairnets to make cheese in laboratories, enrollees in an advanced class this month included: Mark Fischer, a onetime video editor in Manhattan who produces sheep's milk cheese in Weston, Vt.; David Stewart, 47, who sold his manufacturing company to buy a 140-acre farm in Epsom, N.H., where he hopes to be making cheese by next year; and Carrie Lewis, 39, a dental hygienist, of Victoria, British Columbia, who aspires to buy a cheese-making farm in Ontario.
"I'm turning 40," Lewis said. "And it's sort of like: Cheesemaking is what I want to do when I grow up."
While there is textbook science to cheese-making, there is also art in creating nuances of flavor and texture. Established cheese-makers have been bombarded with requests by beginners for apprenticeships to learn the finer points. "They are just coming out of the woodwork," said Tricia Smith, an MIT-trained civil engineer who quit her job at a Cambridge firm for cheese-making in 2000.
New recruits often bring an intensity to cheese-making, eager to find the kind of success they had in their first careers.
"We want to make world-class cheese," said Angela Miller, who along with her husband, Russell Glover, bought a 300-acre farm in West Pawlet, Vt., in 2000. There they spend half their week with a veteran cheese-maker whom they partnered with to turn out cheeses that are on the tasting menus of high-end restaurants such as Daniel in New York and French Laundry in Napa Valley. They spend the other half in Manhattan, where Miller owns a literary agency and Glover is an architect.
"I knew I wanted to do it so badly," Miller said. "It was something where nobody could have stopped me."
Elizabeth and Peter Mulholland also have expansive plans. They began making cheese on their Topsfield, Mass., farm in 1998. A year later, Elizabeth quit her job as director of the Danvers Historical Society; her husband kept his job at Fidelity Investments. This year, hoping to expand the market for their cheeses, she opened a fine-foods and wine store in Topsfield. Now the couple is thinking about building a bigger cheese-making facility.
"You have to get to a scale of cheese-making that pays for the dairy and the equipment," she said. "Otherwise, this is a really crazy hobby."
For more than a century, small-scale cheese-making was not a winning proposition. Larger commercial cheese-makers dominated and forced small farmstead operations out of business.
Then, last decade, cheese got cachet.
Much like wines, premium ice cream, and microbrewed beers, specialty cheeses became popular indulgences. Cheesemongers now struggle to keep pace with demand, and prices for high-end cheese are rising with some artisan cheeses, those that are handmade, commanding as much as $30 a pound at retail shops in Boston and New York.
In the last two decades, the number of artisan cheese-makers nationwide has more than quadrupled, with many of them newcomers to agriculture. In 1990, there were some 75 artisan cheese-makers; in 2000, there were 155; today there are an estimated 400, with about 15 of them in Massachusetts, 20 in Maine, 10 in Connecticut, and five in New Hampshire, according to the newly published "The Atlas of American Artisan Cheese." Vermont has 36 artisan cheese-makers, the most per capita in the nation - a distinction that the Vermont Cheese Council, a trade group, has capitalized on by creating a "cheese trail" for tourists who want to sample cheeses on the farmsteads, a la Napa Valley.
The allure of cheese-making, for some, is the chance to satisfy their inner foodie. Some say they wanted to work with animals and live in a rural setting. For others, making a tactile product is a welcome change from an office-bound existence.
"The whole time I was in the shipping business, I always wished I had something tangible to sell because selling a service can be frustrating," said Bob Stetson, 56, who was a partner in an import-export business for more than a decade in Boston before he and his wife answered an ad for a 20-acre cheese-making farm in Hubbardston, Mass. They bought the farm, sold their house in Roslindale, and have been making chevre and aged blues since 1999.
Still, starting up in cheese-making is no simple thing.
Stetson's cheese-making farm, for example, cost $350,000, and an additional $150,000 to expand the facility. For Stetson, the investment required most of his life's savings, including money from the sale of his partnership. Stetson said he and his wife have been able to live off the earnings from their cheese, which retails for about $15 per pound.
Other challenges can be equally daunting. There is the establishment of a brand and the not-always-dignified chore of bringing the final product to market.
"Like every cheese-maker, you schlep to the cheese stores and you stand there with sweaty palms hoping that they don't choke on your cheese," Works said. "In truth, it's like a cold call in business."
But, he added, "I don't have to be a good salesman. Our cheese tastes good."
