It was a moniker that demanded a marketing campaign. When Alison Hooper, co-founder of the Vermont Butter & Cheese Co., saw the swelling ranks of cheesemakers in her home state in the late 1990s, she declared that Vermont was becoming the Napa Valley of cheese. The state’s cheeses, including Vermont Butter & Cheese’s artisanal chèvre and feta, were winning awards across America. The farmers had local and organic cred. Everything was being produced in a setting that was postcard-perfect, with barns set in brook-watered valleys and cows and goats set out to pasture amid wildflower-covered hills. What they didn’t have was “a strategy to get together and promote Vermont as a brand of cheese,” she says now. “It was a quixotic statement.”

And, it turns out, a prophetic one. Five years ago, spurred by Hooper’s coinage, the Vermont Cheese Council—an umbrella organization that includes four dozen cheesemakers—established the Vermont Cheese Trail and began promoting the state as a destination for tyrophiles. The effort, part of a wave of food-tourism promotion that has spawned wine countries and foodie trails in nearly every state and region, has boosted the profile of Vermont’s cheese industry. Farms say that the number of visitors has increased dramatically and believe that strong word-of-mouth from visits has boosted demand for their cheeses all over the U.S.

But some cheesemakers also wonder whether the attention is worth it—and whether tourism is actually more a burden than a blessing.

Embarking on the Cheese Trail wasn’t easy for the council to do. Its decisions are made by consensus, and while members agreed that a joint promotional effort seemed a good idea, not everybody thought that it should be a high priority for a group with limited resources. But over six months in 2002, several council members cobbled together a map showing all of the state’s cheesemakers, got each one to sign off, and printed up 50,000 copies. “When you can look at a map of where food is produced, you get a better understanding—even if you never go,” Hooper says.

The timing was perfect. The Trail debuted just as foodie culture was seeping into the American mainstream, aided by the march of Whole Foods, the proliferation of farmers markets, the popularity of the Food Network, and the growth of the slow-food movement. “There’s so much interest nationwide in artisanal foods . . . and eating locally. Then there are books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” says Jonathan Wright, president of the Vermont Cheese Council. “All these things have contributed to the huge upswell in interest in where our cheeses come from.” It took two years to go through the first print run of the map, but to keep up with demand, the council has since had to print 100,000 annually.

Wright says the publicity has boosted visitor numbers at his own Taylor Farm, a 500-acre milk-producing spread in the southern Vermont town of Londonderry, near the Stratton Mountain ski area. He had always offered sleigh rides and promoted agritourism to diversify his revenue stream and hedge against the volatility of milk prices, the same reason he began making cheese—specifically, Dutch-style Goudas—in 1998. Before the Cheese Trail, Taylor Farm got around 4,000 visitors a year. This year, Wright expects between 10,000 and 15,000, and sales at his farm shop, open since 2003, are growing at nearly 30 percent a year.