While the Kehlers’ “service provider” strategy is a new concept in the U.S., variations of the model have long thrived in other countries. The Kehlers are actually marrying the French way—in which milk from various farms is turned into Gruyère or Comté and finished at a central facility—with the English farmstead model, in which everything is done at one location and the names of the maker and farm are prominently linked to the cheese. “You can’t obscure the name of the maker here,” says Mateo. “It’s Yankee individualism.” Likewise, the Jasper Hill brand will have a place, however tiny, on a cheese’s label, whether it’s as the affineur, the marketer, or the selector, just as, say, a wine’s importer is always credited on the bottle.

Other makers welcome the visibility that Jasper Hill’s success would bring. “The more Vermont cheese is out there, the better off we all are,” says Van Vlaanderen of Doe’s Leap. But there’s also some polite skepticism, especially from some veteran Vermont cheesemakers. “We’re back-to-the-land hippies who just want our neighbors to buy our cheese. The next generation of farmers, they think, Screw the not-making-money part,” says Orb Weaver Farm’s Marjorie Susman, who in 1981 became Vermont’s first farmstead cheesemaker. “I hope it works, but not everything turns out as well as it looks on paper.”

Even Mateo Kehler admits the plan is “slightly crazy.” Back inside his farmhouse, two of his staff are channeling water out of a huge vat of curds. In about three months, the curds, helped along by mold and an affineur, will become Bartlett Blue, Jasper Hill’s riff on Stilton. In this, Mateo sees a metaphor for what they’re trying doing with the production process. “We get inspiration from the Old World and adapt it to the realities and constraints of our lives,” he says. “We don’t have the history, so we don’t have the constraints of history. That can be an advantage. Or not.”