I found River Valley Ranch’s cheese disappointing. Pacific Northwest Cheese Project seems to disagree — I think.

The Project’s recent post focuses on the farm’s successes: attracting media and finding retailers. Not a lot on the cheese, at least how it tastes.

I really wanted to like it. I enjoy raw milk cheese, goat cheese, and stinky cheese. The RVR cheese I tasted is all of these things.

I am a cheese purist. Fruit, nuts, peppers, and other weirdness does not belong in my cheese. Many of RVR’s varieties include these things, but that wasn’t my objection. I didn’t taste that cheese. What I tasted was pure goat milk cheese. Very goaty goat milk cheese.

I pause before using the word “goaty.” Many goat milk products have a tang — think of the last chevre you ate. That’s not what I mean by goaty. I mean distinctive off flavor that is only distantly related to that tang. Sadly, it’s what many people think of when they think of goat cheese. And that’s why many people think goat cheese is gross.

Here’s the thing. Goat cheese isn’t supposed to taste like that. Goat milk — fresh, raw goat milk — doesn’t taste like that. It sometimes will if you pasteurize it. It will if you let it sit in your fridge, forgotten, for three weeks. It will if you don’t cool the milk soon enough after milking, or if you feed your goats things that goats aren’t meant to eat, or if your goats are unhealthy. But fresh, raw goat milk tastes sweet and mild. Not much different from cow milk.

I don’t know which of those problems, if any, applies to Julie’s goat milk and hence her cheese. But she’s been farming for a pretty short time, and I don’t think she’s got goat care down yet.

The farm didn’t strike me as especially healthy. I’m not a farmer, but as Wendell Berry wrote, “one need not be a specialist to understand the difference between good and bad farming. There is nothing mysterious or abstruse about it…the health of a farm is as apparent to the eye as the health of a person.”

What I’m saying isn’t all that nice to River Valley Ranch, especially since Julie graciously allowed me to visit. And it’s presumptuous, especially since I don’t keep goats. (Though if my property were bigger I could, and probably would. It recently became legal to keep goats in Seattle back yards. See my city goat post at the Ethicurean.)

But I do know about goat care — from reading, of course. I’ve read a lot about caring for goats because I’m convinced that somehow one of these days I will be.

More importantly, I’ve learned from people who do keep goats, and from drinking the milk from those goats, and eating the cheese made from that milk.

There are a lot of really great goat cheese makers in the Northwest, and I’ll keep reading the Pacific Northwest Cheese Project to learn about them. But I probably won’t be watching River Valley Ranch.