Culture Magazine

40 culturecheesemag.com BEGINNINGS 2024 the pond to France. Thanks to the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) program, Rimes lived and worked at four different dairies in one summer, from the foothills of the Pyrenees to the peaks of the Montagne Noire. Among them was Raphaël Lefroc's, whose 18-cow herd grazed on the rich grass of the dormant volcano range of the Auvergne region. At summer's end, Rimes learned that Lefroc was "desperately short of help," and though she was still green, she found herself in charge of the dairy, specifically producing his little lactic P'tits Bibis, which Lefroc himself continually threatened to abandon. "'They take a lot of time; they never seem to work for me. Ugh, I'm gonna give them up,'" she recalls him lamenting. But Rimes wasn't deterred. Motivated by the question that nagged her constantly, she asked permission to take a stab at mastering them. "He sort of grudgingly agreed, and over time, we experimented, and I think they perhaps got a little bit more consistent? I don't know." Rimes remained in the Auvergne for nearly three years. Resurfacing Welsh Terroir Upon her return to Wales in 2014, Rimes had a new passion project: making her own sheep's milk cheese in the Welsh countryside. Of the three types of milk Rimes worked with in France, she found sheep's milk to be the most satisfying. "It just asks to be made into cheese, really," she says, because it has higher fat content than cow, goat, and even buffalo. Because Wales is home to around 10 million sheep, it seemed like the perfect place for her project— provided she could find a dairy. Because the "vast majority" of sheep in Wales are bred for meat and would yield little milk, she explains, it took some time before she stumbled upon Sheep Milk Company, a Lancashire dairy Clockwise f rom top: A cheese board featuring Menai Wyn Jones' Môn Las and various ages of Brefu Bach; A sign indicating the cheesemaking facility was once a Catholic church; a wheel of her Olwyn Fawr.

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