Receiving a new sheep cheese wrapped in grape leaves was all the excuse I needed to fire up the Green Egg. But receiving cooking instructions from the cheesemaker made the decision inevitable. “I recommend grilling it for 5 to 6 minutes, until it gives when you pick it up with tongs,” says the maker. “I love grilling peaches with it.”

I didn’t do the peach part but otherwise followed directions and was rewarded with a warm, creamy, lemony disk that we slathered on grilled toast. The cheesemaker told me she was inspired by an image in a cookbook of French vineyard workers grilling grape leaf-wrapped cheese, but I have the same book and that image doesn’t exist. Even so, I get how a fantasy like that can lodge in your brain. The flavor of this grilled cheese is transporting. If your imagination takes you to a vineyard in France, or a terrace in the Loire Valley with a bottle of Sancerre, go with it.

From Blakesville Creamery in Wisconsin, the new Pecuri in i Vigne riffs on a long European tradition of wrapping fresh cheeses in grape or chestnut leaves. Cheesemaker Veronica Pedraza uses bottled grape leaves—the same ones you might purchase to make rice-stuffed Greek dolmas. Fresh grape leaves are hard to come by in Wisconsin, and the bottled leaves are more pliable, says Pedraza. Another option is blanched chard leaves if you want to wrap a storebought cheese for grilling.

Pedraza is a relentlessly creative cheesemaker who has, after a circuitous journey, landed in a comfortable spot professionally. For Blakesville Creamery, a new goat farm, she has developed several award-winning goat cheeses. But Blakesville is also not far from a new and ambitious dairy sheep enterprise, prompting Pedraza to broaden her sights.

Mariana Marques de Almeida, a Portuguese livestock expert, has been working for years to breed a flock of high-quality dairy sheep in Wisconsin. Using semen imported from Spain, from the highly regarded Assaf breed, she and her partners at Ms. J. and Co. have slowly built up a troupe of 400 sheep that are almost pure-bred Assaf. Because of the breed’s fertility, productivity, disease resistance and milk quality, the Assaf has the potential to make sheep dairying profitable in the U.S. What an enormous breakthrough that would be. The only roadblock preventing Marques de Almeida and her partners from scaling up to 1,000 sheep is uncertain demand.

“We can only double when we find the market to absorb the milk,” says the breeder. “We are too small for the big cheese plants and too big for the small ones.”

In the meantime, Pedraza is dreaming up recipes for this luscious milk, which is notably high in fat and protein—the “solids” necessary for cheese. Blakesville Creamery’s Mariana, an aged sheep tomme named for Marques de Almeida, just placed in the top 10 at the recent American Cheese Society competition. But it’s Pedraza’s softer sheep cheeses that spoke to me.

Pecuri in i Vigne—in Corsican, “sheep in the vines”—is a lactic-set cheese, meaning the culture works slowly and yields a curd with a lot of acidity. The four- to five- ounce rindless disks are only about three days old when they’re enrobed in wine-soaked grape leaves and vacuum sealed. Pedraza says Pecuri continues to improve for weeks, with the wine infusing the interior and the texture softening a bit.

The sample she sent me was about six weeks old when I brushed it with olive oil and grilled it—over indirect heat, as she suggested, and just until it started to quiver. I put a little more olive oil on it afterward and some cracked black peppercorns. The cheese softened on the grill but was still sliceable. The flavor was fresh, bright and lemony, with a hint of wood smoke. Delightful!

I also really enjoyed Llanes, a 1 1/2- pound bloomy-rind sheep cheese that would be a distinctive presence in any cheese case. I can’t think of a comparable cheese from sheep’s milk, although Blakesville’s Shabby Shoe, from goat’s milk, is similar. Matured for about three weeks at the creamery, it develops a powdery white rind and starts to soften from the outside in. The interior is creamy, not chalky, with subtle aromas of cheesecake and cave. The flavor is rich and buttery, with a lemony finish.

Llanes, Spanish for a wool merchant, is the maiden name of Pedraza’s grandmother. “Of my grandparents’ surnames, three out of four are sheep related,” says the cheesemaker. Surely a good omen.

Look for Blakesville Creamery sheep cheeses at these retailers:
California
Agnes (Pasadena)
The Cheese Parlor (Livermore)
Cookbook Market (Highland Park)
Milkfarm (Los Angeles)
Paradise Pantry (Ventura)
Rainbow Grocery (San Francisco)
Smallgoods (San Diego)
Wine & Eggs (Los Angeles)

East Coast
Associated Supermarket (Brooklyn)
Bedford Cheese Shop (NYC)
Bklyn Larder (NYC)
Cheese Shop of Concord (Concord, MA)
Cheese Shop of Portland (Portland, ME)
The Curd Nerd (Syracuse, NY)
Fairfield Cheese Shop (Fairfield, CT)
Formaggio Kitchen (Cambridge, MA)
Greene Grape (Brooklyn)
Greenwich Cheese Shop (Greenwich, CT) 
King Andrew Cheese (Shelter Island, NY)
Lucille Wine Shop (Lynn, MA)
Monger’s Palate (Brooklyn)
One Wicker Cheese (Highlands, NC)
Paste & Rind (Washington, DC)
Van Hook Cheese & Grocery (Montclair and Jersey City, NJ)

Midwest & Beyond
All Together Now (Chicago)
Cheese Shop of Des Moines
France 44 (Minneapolis)
Mongers’ Provisions (Detroit and Berkley, MI)
Picnic New Mexico (Santa Fe)