I love aged sheep cheeses so much that even a mediocre one will tempt me. But a sublime Manchego like the one pictured here makes me greedy. I don’t want to share it; I want to hoard it. Of course, I also want every cheese lover to know about it and buy it so that the shipments keep coming. Manchego is Spain’s top-selling cheese by a mile, with 61 different producers. But if you want to taste the gold standard, in my view it’s this one.
Manchego 1605 stands out even on paper. According to Rachel Juhl of Essex Cheese, the U.S. importer, it’s one of fewer than five farmstead raw-milk Manchegos. That means it’s made on the farm where the sheep are. The overwhelming majority of Manchego is made in a factory from pooled and pasteurized milk and sold as Queso Manchego PDO; the added designation “Artesano” is reserved for raw-milk wheels.
Essex Cheese co-founder Jason Hinds stumbled on this unusual Manchego in a Madrid cheese shop about 15 years ago. The shop owner had had a role in creating it, advising on the methods and the maturation.
Finca Sierra de la Solana, the sheep farm that provides the milk, dates from the 1870s. During the Franco era, like virtually all other Spanish cheese producers, the farm was forced to abandon traditional cheesemaking methods. Franco believed that small creameries weren’t efficient. Get big or get out. But in the early 2000s, the property changed hands. The new owners, a wealthy family with roots in La Mancha, wanted to produce a world-class Manchego by returning to the old ways. They brought in consultants, built a state-of-the-art facility and resumed raw-milk cheese production under the Queseria 1605 brand.
Queseria 1605 takes its name from the year that Don Quixote was first published. Presumably, Cervantes’s hero might have known cheese similar to this one.
Manchego master: cheesemaker Maria José Gonzales
José Luis Martin, the Madrid cheese shop owner and an affineur, selects the wheels for Essex Cheese. They are six to eight months old when they arrive in the U.S. A Manchego lover will notice immediately that they are different. They have a natural rind, not the waxed and tinted rind that is far more typical. Natural rinds grow mold, and initially, Juhl says, this freaked people out.
“You wouldn’t believe the amount of calls I got, and still do,” she told me. “There’s mold? That’s wonderful. The cheese is alive.”
Manchego 1605 also has a gentle flavor profile that doesn’t accord with what many expect. It doesn’t have piquant or peppery notes —what Juhl calls “the itch.”
“Itch isn’t good,” says the importer. That sensation comes from lipase, an enzyme that cheesemakers working with pasteurized milk add to make their Manchego spicier. If overused, the impression can indeed be biting.
In a video on the Essex Cheese site, Martin describes what he is looking for in the wheels he selects: buttery texture, fruitiness, a pineapple note, spice but not too much, an almond flavor at the end. A persistent, lingering flavor is important.
Juhl has a dozen years’ worth of tasting notes so I’m going to defer to her description. Suffice it to say that I can’t get enough of this phenomenal cheese. I asked her if she noticed a big difference between summer and winter cheeses.
Absolutely, she said. In summer, the sheep drink more water so the milk is less rich. “You get more vegetal, artichoke and olive notes in summer cheese,” says Juhl. “It’s more citrusy. In winter, you get rich, decadent brioche, almond and marzipan notes.”
You can find Manchego 1605 at these retailers. Or register for my “Spain on Your Plate” class on Tuesday, June 10, in Napa. You can bet this wonderful Spanish import is going to be on the plate.