Culture Magazine

I N N OVAT I O N 202 3 culturecheesemag.com 49 L ittle did the Giacominis know, 40 years after they settled on their land and raised a family, their daughters would come back to the farm and join the emerging California artisan cheese movement, led by neighbors Sue Conley and Peggy Smith of Cowgirl Creamery. Today, the Giacominis' creamery has expanded well beyond only producing milk to include a culinary and education center called The Fork, and a second creamery with a state-of-the-art filtration system right off Highway 101 in Petaluma. "It was really all about timing," says Jill Giacomini Basch, who, along with her sisters Diana Giacomini Hagen and Lynn Giacomini Stray, now shares the leadership roles at Point Reyes. "We had all gone away to college and had little interest in coming back to the farm to sell fluid milk—but we were interested in a value-added product like cheese." Basch credits an influential workshop at the University of California Agriculture Extension, co-hosted by Cowgirl Creamery and the California Farm Bureau, which detailed the benefits of diversifying family dairy farms and convinced her and her sisters to join a growing number of fellow artisan cheesemakers. In 1998 the three women (plus a fourth sister, Karen Giacomini Howard, who has since retired) joined their parents and hired an accomplished cheesemaker from Maytag Dairy Farms in Iowa. Together they released their first cheese in 2000, a raw-milk, rindless, classic-style blue cheese made on the farm with milk produced from their herd of 450 cows—Point Reyes Farmstead Original Blue. "There was a big learning curve," Basch says. She describes those early years as consumed with taking classes, refining the blue cheese recipe, attending cheese conferences, and learning as much about the market as they possibly could—all while raising their own families. She is quick to express her Driving along the stretch of Highway 1 that skirts Northern California's Tomales Bay, the scenery is so stunning that it's easy to miss the turn off for Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company. The farm isn't visible f rom the narrow one-lane paved road that winds east away f rom the bay through rolling green pastures dotted with grazing cows until, at the crest of a gentle hill, it suddenly comes into view. The dairy has undergone multiple renovations and upgrades over the years, but the low-slung buildings nestled into the natural curves and valleys of the land are evidence that it has retained its small family farm sensibility. In fact, old photos reveal that it looks much like it did when Bob and Dean Giacomini purchased the 700-acre farm in 1959. CHEESEMAKER profile

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