Salers and Artisons at
the Cowgirl Creamery

In 1976, two young women from the University of Tennesee took a hippie trip in a baby blue Chevy Van to San Francisco to find a place at the table of the city's up-and-coming food scene; one landed at the famed Chez Panisse, working under the founder of the farm-to-table movement in America, Alice Waters, and the other opened Bette's Oceanview.  Their paths reconvened some years later at Point

Reyes Station just up the coast from the city by the bay in the form of an old barn they turned to a cheese making facility, which they came to call The Cowgirl Creamery, today one of the foremost quality cheesemakers in the U.S.

"Legend has it that when Peggy and Sue were exploring names for their budding cheese business, two women on horseback pulled up in front of the barn, hitched their horses to the bike rack and ran into the grocery store for supplies.  Ellen Straus, who was visiting at the time, looked at Sue and Peggy and

 A Point Reyes Station Farm

said, 'We're living in the Wild West out here.' Peggy's response: 'Then we must be cowgirls!  And this must be the Cowgirl Creamery.' Two decades, dozens of awards, two creameries, four retail stores and two thousand tons of cheese later, it's safe to say they've earned their 10-gallon hats."

It's not by accident that the seacoast hill region of northern California would come to provide world-class cheese.  The mountainous high elevation grazing ground for cattle harkens to the world famous

 homeland of cheesemaking at Auvergne, France, where the enormous Saler cattle feed on ancient

volcanic earth to produce a rich and rustic cream that is eventually put to good use concocting novel cheeses like the Fromage aux Artisons.  The 'artisons' refer to the specialty mites that aid in sculpting this raw pressed cheese the color of straw.  The Cowgirls' own best cheese, Red Hawk, (soon to be delivered to Quarry Lane!), is described: "The wild bacteria that define this bold, sumptuous triple

cream are native to Point Reyes; in fact, we could not make this cheese anywhere else.  Aged four weeks and washed with a brine solution encourages the sunset red-orange rind, Red Hawk captures the true essence of West Marin."  Just as the Hogs Island Oyster must taste like Tomales Bay, the Cowgirl cheeses tastes like the pungent and lush mountainous seacoast looming above the rising ocean spray.