Marin Cheese Factory tour
7500 Red Hill Rd., Petaluma, CA
http://www.marinfrenchcheese.com/
Review date: May 2011
 
My niece clued us in on the LivingSocial website (URL: http://livingsocial.com/) where the Marin Cheese Factory was offering half off for a couple's tour. It seemed a good deal for $15 and as we were going to be in the area for a few days, promised a nice drive. I always love driving the Marin and Sonoma County hills - especially as the hills are still green and the summer tourists haven't yet arrived en masse.
 
As it turned out there was some difficulty scheduling because most people want to do this on the weekends, but we were trying for a weekday. The president, Max, does the tours, but he was going to be on vacation the week we were visiting so they had to find a sub. Finally we got it settled for a Wednesday afternoon with the marketing director, so off we went in between dining at Willi's Seafood/Healdsburg and Bistro M/Windsor.
 
(Yes, if you look at a map it was a lot of boring driving back and forth on Hwy 101, but Suzanne just couldn't do it Thursday, so we ditched the idea of Bodega Bay (again) for the tour instead)
 
The scenery was lovely but unfamiliar to us, so it wasn't until we got very close that I said to Carlos, "You know, we've been here before, but it was decades ago!" And indeed, this is the same cheesemaker who does the Rouge et Noir brand Camembert that we recall buying. We hadn't immediately identified it because we used to come up from the SF/Golden Gate Bridge side (going north), whereas this time we were traveling due east from the Petaluma city borders.
 
Back then they only made two cheese, the morning cheese "Le Petit Dejeuner" and the Camembert. It's still the same building, with the same parking lot, the same pretty little pond with a few big trees and a view of rolling green hills. They are now a creamery, though, no longer owning their own dairy herd. They have also branched out into some variants of the Brie-Camembert line which we weren't aware of.
 
Unfortunately they weren't making cheese that day, but the tour is relatively quick. It is still a relatively small operation and almost everything is hand-done, including hand-wrapping every single piece of cheese (and that's a lot of wrapping, LOL). I mean, it's been at least thirty years since we were here buying cheese, and they use one single digital scale to weigh all the cheese they sell. 
 
Think about that. Thousands of people buy their cheese - they may not be Kraft, but they are pretty well known in Northern CA. And they have One. Digital. Scale. The 12" kind your local butcher shop uses, except he's not shipping little hunks of cheese all over the country.
 
Even though we didn't see them making cheese, it's a simple process. The milk comes in, they put in the coagulant and the bacteria for making either Brie or Camembert, then cut the curds and pour them out into strainer trays. The whey runs down a drain, to eventually be given to pig farmers for feed. Here in the US we like things sanitary, so Marin Cheese uses packaged bacteria. Unlike most cheesemakers, they add it to the milk so the Rouge et Noir cheeses ripen from within, instead of just from the outside in.
 
The curds are formed into cakes, placed on drainer trays, given a saline wash, then immediately numbered - just a hand lettered number for the date of mfg and the type of cheese - and they begin rotating the trays through the 'cave' where other interesting strains of bacteria have been hanging around since the cheesemaking started in the 1800's. Doing so produces the unique qualities of a creamery/dairy's cheeses. 
 
The trays go into carefully controlled holding rooms for several days, until they're ready to be weighed and wrapped. Marin Cheese makes three different types of Camembert (Regular, Yellow Buck, and Melange – the latter being a mixture of cow and goat milk) and a number of different Bries, in addition to an Austrian-type cheese they call Schloss and several bleu cheeses, including a goat's milk bleu that was lovely. 
 
After the quick factory tour - there's only a few rooms - we went outside to have a full cheese tasting. They usually offer wine, but we opted for water. Because we were the only ones on the tour with Suzanne, we sat and talked for almost an hour about food and dining around the Bay Area, a subject near and dear to her heart as well as ours (we all agreed Cyrus is a waste of time, and Bouchon is eclipsed only by the French Laundry).
 
She told us a great anecdote about visiting one of the premier cheesemakers in France. Here in the US, the bacterial strains for cheesemaking come packaged, literally in Ziploc bags. When her cheese tour in France got to the 'cave', there were huge rounds of half-baked rye bread set out, which are used to encourage growth of the bacteria for aging the cheeses which gives them their unique character. No Ziploc baggies for them!
 
At the end of the tour they give you a bag with three free cheeses (not always the same ones) and some minor swag: a coffee cup, a wine opener, a refrigerator magnet of their logo, and a cheese knife. We ended up with an entire mid-sized wheel of triple-crème Brie, with smaller wheels of Le Petit Dejeuner and the Le Petit Bleu, both of which we liked a lot. 

When my niece went on the tour she got a coupon for 20% off purchases from the retail shop. I looked inside our bag but there wasn't one included. Instead, when we went up to the cashier with our additional purchases of Camembert, the goat cheese bleu and the Schloss, they only charged us for the Camembert. So we got two free cheeses and a free cup of French Roast coffee (and they use Thanksgiving brand, one of my favs). I didn't total it up, but I think we probably came out ahead.
 
The Schloss is a very interesting cheese. It's a Leiderkranz-type cheese, with what's known as a "smear-ripened" rind. It's a 'stinky' cheese, with a flavor reminiscent of bacon. We bought a chunk to experiment with. I make a filo pastry wrap appetizer with smoked Gouda and sun-dried tomatoes, that might work very well with the Schloss instead. 
 
We weren't expecting much from this trip, what with trying to squeeze in visits with a couple of busy friends and the constant driving up and down Hwy 101 between Petaluma and Healdsburg. This is one of the ugliest stretches of freeway by a long shot, due to nasty congestion from the construction still going on to widen it by an additional two lanes. It didn't help that the weather was forecasted as iffy and the first day it rained surprisingly hard. 
 
But the rains slid away and the sun came out, with a nice breeze and big fluffy white clouds. This tour/tasting turned out to be the high point of our trip. The drive out was lovely, the tour itself was fun, the picnic area had a charming vista, and the cheeses were as good as the conversation. Suzanne, who used to work on marketing for Laura Chenel's goat cheese dairy, said they are coming out with two new Bries currently in testing - a truffle Brie and a fig Brie, so something new to look forward to. 
 
Now, are the Bries and Camemberts from Rouge et Noir as good as the French? Ummmm....no. Not really that close. They'll even admit that, under duress. Although we liked the Brie, both of us still prefer Rouge et Noir's Camembert, which has a richer, riper flavor. But they are good cheeses, go well with food, are nicely priced, and as local as you can get. 
 
We'd forgotten how much we do like their cheese. Now that we've been reminded, we don't intend to forget again.