For 25 years, Uplands Cheese Company owner Andy Hatch has been making customers happy with his cheese — in particular, the smeared alpine cheeses.
The secret? Cheese caves.
“It’s really our effort to make something singular and distinctive, as opposed to something generic and homogeneous,” the Dodgeville, Wisc., cheesemaker said.
To get their unique flavor, Hatch’s smeared alpine cheeses spend a year in the cave-aging process, during which they are washed in salt water every day for the first six weeks after the curd is formed, and then weekly after that.
“It keeps what can be a repetitive industry fresh and continually evolving and developing and interesting for us and our customers,” he said.
European cheesemakers have long known that microflora, or bacteria, thrive in cold and humid environments like caves. Bacteria grow mold on the cheese, causing it to develop a certain flavor and texture. Some common cave-aged cheeses include Brie and blue cheese.
“You can get a lot more complexity by also focusing on growing something on the exterior of the cheese,” Benjamin Ullerup Mathers, lead for specialty cheese at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Dairy Research, said.
When Swiss, Italian and German cheesemakers immigrated to Wisconsin in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they brought their affining, or cheese-aging, practices with them. When they couldn’t find natural cave environments, they created them.
Wisconsin produced a quarter of the country’s cheese in 2025, with 28% being specialty cheese, including most cave-aged cheese, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Specialty cheese production in the state has grown from around 330 million pounds to over a billion pounds in the last 20 years.
Cave-aging cheese is a high-maintenance process. The steps taken vary depending on the cheese type, with many choices that need to be made after the cheese has curdled.
“Once you start to stir the curd, how fast do you stir it? And when do you start cooking the curd? And once you start cooking the curd, how fast do you apply temperature? And then how long do you apply temperature? And then how hot do you take it?” Hatch, the cheesemaker said. “Every little incremental step, there are these decisions.”
Cave-aging fell out of fashion as industrialization brought cheaper and more scalable methods of aging cheese. Most large cheese manufacturers today seal large blocks of cheese in plastic and place them into a refrigerator, which allows cheese to be aged at a colder temperature than in caves.
“We learned how to make new types of cheese, which is positive,” Ullerup Mathers said. “The only negative is that we lost some of that traditional knowledge of how you cave-age, and that means we lost some of those traditional flavors.”
But cave-aged cheese has made a comeback in the past few decades, he said.
Willi Lehner, the son of a Swiss cheesemaker, founded Bleu Mont Dairy in 2006. He dug a cave into the hillside in Blue Mounds, Wisc., to make his famous bandaged cheddar cheese, created by wrapping cheddar wheels in lard-soaked cloth and spraying it with a mold mixture.
But “cave” can be a somewhat loose term.
Most modern-day cave-aged cheese isn’t made in a natural cave but in a facility simulating the temperature and humidity of a cave. Most cheese ages in a cave unsealed, according to Ullerup Mathers.
Widmer’s Cheese Cellars in Theresa, Wisc., has been cave-aging cheese since 1922, when the shop was founded. Its famous brick cheese is affined in basement rooms, also called cheese cellars, at the bottom of the plant.
While brick cheese is also a washed-rind cheese, owner Joe Widmer, the grandson of the shop’s founder, adjusts the cellar’s conditions to encourage the growth of a particular bacterium that helps the cheese develop an orange mold.
Widmer said this process also creates an unpleasant odor as the bacteria give off gases like ammonia. This odor is a source of contention among his customers.
“Some people love it, and some people are like, ‘No way,’” he said.
Still, Ullerup Mathers encourages those who are able to try cave-aged cheese.
“Try the thing that smells a little funky, or that has some natural, intentional mold on it,” Ullerup Mathers said. “A lot of times they’re coming from small producers who can use the business and who are trying to preserve a legacy.”
The majority of cave-aging cheesemakers are small business owners like Hatch and Widmer, for whom this process is expensive, difficult to scale and high-maintenance.
But what keeps them afloat is the unique product they are creating.
“We are a small producer without any competitive advantages of scale or low-cost production,” Hatch said. “We’re really pretty inefficient, and so for us to be competitive in the market, we need to create cheese that is distinctive, and cave-aging cheese is one of the best ways to do that in cheesemaking.”
Hatch said cave-aged cheese also carries sentimental value, which is why people continue to make and buy it today.
“Even if it’s not the cheese you put in your child’s lunch box, it’s cheese that is evocative of a place,” Hatch said. “I think cave-aging cheese harvests the ambient terroir of a place and tastes like place. This is something that a lot of people can connect with.”
