avril 12-16: La Ferme de Roquecave

I was met at the Béziers train station by my next host, Ingo, who was on his way home from the Saturday market there. He carpools with Philippe, a beekeeper from just up the road. The hour-long drive back to the farm was through some stunning scenery. The Minervois plain is named after the town of Minerve and rests between the foothills of the Pyrenees and the mountains of the Haut Languedoc. It’s full of vineyards, with small villages dotting the plain and tree-lined roads connecting them.

Roquecave is located in the regional park of the Haut Languedoc at about 680m altitude. As we climbed, the countryside changed from vines and olive trees to scrubby pines and meadows with wildflowers. Finally, the area near the farm is filled with chestnuts and other deciduous trees, interspersed with plantations of pines and bare hilltop meadows. It’s easily the most dramatic scenery I’ve had so far.

Ingo and Carole have lived her for 25 years. The house is about 200 years old and the outbuildings a bit younger. I sleep in a small house just across from the main one that they rent out during the summer. There’s also a studio for rent, a barn with large hayloft and space where the animal food is stored, the attached milking parlor, and the bergerie for the 35 goats which is a high tunnel construction in plastic with large pens inside. The 46 chickens live here at night, too, though they roam free during the day.

Right now they have friends visiting who are a German couple, a bit younger than me. Ingo is German himself, and they chatter away sometimes which is entertaining and incomprehensible to me. But at least it’s not English. Rebekah and Andrei are really nice and it’s been a jolly crowd around the table at meals. Camille, the youngest daughter at 16, lives here, and the eldest lives not far with her boyfriend, so we’ve been quite a few for seriously yummy dinners. I had nettle soup for the first time last night, made with nettles that Carole harvested here! Yum. Home-made jam, tarts made with garden fruits (frozen mostly), local meats, and lots and lots of cheese. We have toast, jam and cheese for breakfast in fact, and there is always a cheese course at lunch and dinner.

This is, after all, a cheese farm. Ingo takes care of the goats: milking twice a day with a machine, herding them to the path they take to the pasture, giving sick ones medicine (charcoal and baking soda to settle the stomach right now). The milking process is down to a smooth routine. The ladies walk up a ramp from the bergerie to a platform where they stick their heads into a trough to eat. Argus, the shepherd dog, helps get them to move along, and when they’re in place, Ingo rotates the four milking machines through the 12 goats who are there at a time. His movements are deliberate and distinct, clearly honed after 23 years of the same routine. Milk production is very low this year, about half of what it is normally because so many sheep have been sick. Ingo’s not quite sure what it is and is off at the homeopathic vet right now.

Consequently, there’s less cheese stocked up and less cheese to make. But Carole is still at it. She makes cheese about four days a week, all raw milk, eight kinds, though no tomme right now because of the milk shortage. It’s truly amazing that the same milk, bacteria and enzymes can become totally different cheeses depending on their form, length of aging and salting. Once a year, Carole buys starter bacteria that she then keeps going in bottles of milk kept behind, exact same concept as a sourdough starter. Rennet is added to the milk also to catalyze the curding reaction.

My job twice now has been to mold the fresh cheese, spooning the thickened milk into small, round molds with holes in them. These cheeses only rest a day to set up. I have also done the other very typical cheesemaking task which is washing and turning the cheeses. As they age, the cheeses need to keep a consistent texture throughout and have the mold evenly distributed on their surface. Hence you flip the cheese over to expose its other side to the air, and you wash the rind with salt water to distribute the mold. These cheeses hang out in an ambient temperature room that stays relatively cool. Some are also put in the drying room just before being sold, and some are in an un-cooled fridge.

As Carole noted today, cheesemaking is really about one-third dealing with the cheese and two-thirds cleaning. I haven’t done any yet, but there is a lot of washing of molds, racks and basins, plus tables, floors and jugs.

Since there’s not much work to do, I’ve had free time to go for runs and walks in the gorgeous forest scenery. We all went for a slow mountain promenade on Sunday when the weather was warm and clear. And I walked with Ingo and Camille down to town with two of their donkeys that were being loaned out to a friend. Yes, there are normally four donkeys and three horses that live in the high pasture, too, that are used for carrying baggage or people on walks. The menagerie also includes another dog and four cats, one of whom is a ridiculously cute kitten and one of whom is pregnant.