America wouldn’t have a dairy industry without immigrants. Italians, Dutch, Germans, French, Mexicans, Swiss…they came here with their recipes and expertise, started dairy farms and made the cheeses they knew. Next week, one of these immigrant families—cheesemakers for five generations—is calling it quits, and I’m not the only one grieving. Businesses close all the time, but this creamery was one of a kind, producing a handmade cheese that resembles nothing else and selling it in a way that probably doomed them.
Joe and Mary Matos grew up, met and married on the island of São Jorge in the Portuguese Azores. They emigrated to California in 1965, and Joe began milking cows for Sonoma County dairies. Joe came from a long line of cheesemakers, so of course he and Mary soon tried making a few wheels of São Jorge-style cheese for home use. Friends liked it and you can see where this is going.
Fifth-gen dairyman: Joe Matos and grandson
In 1979, Matos Cheese Factory opened its doors, producing one cheese only—the anglicized St. George, made with raw milk from the family’s own Santa Rosa dairy farm. Joe worked the night shift at a local brickyard, came home and did the morning milking, slept and then went back to the brickyard. Mary made the cheese, eventually assisted by their daughter, Sylvia. In their tidy aging room (pictured above), they matured the wheels from three months to a year or more. They shipped St. George to Portuguese markets around the country and sold it at Portuguese festivals in California. The cheese was better known in Boston than in San Francisco.
In 1995, Sue Conley stumbled on the farm and recognized a diamond in the rough. Conley and her partner, Peg Smith, were starting to build the company that would become Tomales Bay Foods and looking for Sonoma and Marin County products that needed marketing. “We don’t want marketing,” the Matoses told Conley. “We just want you to sell it.”
The whole enterprise was rustic, like going back in time, recalls Conley. The closet-sized farm store, at the end of a dirt road, was typically closed, but if you rang the bell Mary would come out of the house. She would wordlessly hand you a generous sample, then cut you a piece of any size and wrap it with paper and string. The young cheese was creamy, the older cheese crumbly and tart.
“The cheese had a bit of a Cheddar flavor, and the way they pressed it was to put it in a cheese form and pile cinder blocks on top,” recalls Conley. In a long-ago feature I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, I described St. George as milky, grassy, sturdy and snackable—a great picnic cheese.
The family’s business practices were quirky, to say the least. The retail price was ridiculously under market, and Conley could not convince Mary to raise it.
Cheese by hand: Mary Matos prepares a wheel for sale (Photo: Sue Conley)
“Dad and Mom thought that if they raised the price, the Portuguese people wouldn’t buy it,” said Sylvia. “We did a price increase probably every five years, maybe by a dollar or fifty cents.” Sales will cease at the end of this month, but the current prices range from $12 to $16 a pound, depending on age. Comparable raw-milk farmstead cheeses typically fetch twice that.
Tomales Bay Foods did grow the audience for St. George, placing it in independent cheese shops and, for a time, in the Williams-Sonoma catalog and Lufthansa’s first-class catalog. Mary was unfazed. “She wasn’t impressed by the accolades or fancy stores,” says Conley. “She just wanted to know how much to make.”
Mistakenly, I assumed this reliable California classic would always be there for the next picnic. Not so. Mary passed away two years ago, Joe is ailing and costs are climbing, especially for insurance. Sylvia can’t make the business pencil out and finally had to tell her dad it was time to turn off the lights. “It’s one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make,” she said.
And so it goes. Another dairy farm sells its cows and shuts its doors. Thanks for the memories, Matos Family. If you’d like a final taste of St. George, get yourself to the farm store before January 31.