Enter the Mystic Cheese Company in Groton, and you’ll notice, right in front of you, a bevy of medals hanging from a shelf. They come from The Big E and the Good Food Awards.

And there is an impressive recent addition: a gold medal from the American Cheese Society, which is the biggest trade organization for cheese making and the cheese industry in the U.S. The entries to this year’s contest topped 1,500.

The Mystic Cheese Company’s cheese dubbed The Gray won first place in the category of International Style, made with cow milk, during the society’s conference held in July in Buffalo, N.Y.

The Gray, a Cheshire cheese that was in a category with 27 other types of cheese, ended up with 99.5 points out of 100.

Brian Civitello, founder of the Mystic Cheese Company, said, “We got some really wonderful feedback (from the judges) about the texture, the flavor was nutty, long finish and a good balance of acidity.” That long finish means “the flavor keeps evolving on your palate as you chew the product and eat the product,” he said.

Civitello hasn’t been able to absolutely confirm it yet, but he thinks there might be only one other person in America making Cheshire — which was sort of a precursor to cheddar but a little more tart and savory.

“To have it be recognized is really cool, not just for Mystic Cheese, but the idea that these older creamy, crumbly styles of cheese that have been forgotten may be able to make a resurgence,” Civitello said. “To me as a cheese maker, that’s maybe the most exciting part of doing that. I like doing these kind of resurgence projects.”

More later on his upcoming resurgence project, which involves pineapple cheese.

What a history

As for bringing back Cheshire, Civitello noted that it is the oldest cheese known to have been made in the U.K. It was a style that was brought there by the Romans, who taught Celts how to make the cheese. The first actual mention of Cheshire dates to 640 A.D.

“It had been the most popular cheese in the U.K. up until World War II,” Civitello said. “What happened, interestingly, is the shipping lanes and the freight lanes to get Cheshire into London gave them a big advantage.”

At the time, horse and carriages weren’t a good option, and cars and trucks didn’t have refrigeration. They could move the cheese by ship from the county of Cheshire to London in just a day, and so it outcompeted all the other territorial cheeses in the country.

Things changed after WWII.

“The makers of cheddars were then able, with mechanization and improvements in their factories and refrigeration, to get cheese cheaper from Cheddar, England, to London and to all the main markets. In the matter of just a few years, Cheshire goes from being in the thousands of people making it to no one making it. There are currently only about three people left in the U.K. making this style of cheese. It’s a forgotten treasure,” Civitello said.

There’s a history of Cheshire cheese being made in New England by the early settlers as well. There are some historical mentions of it in Connecticut and Rhode Island, Civitello said. A lot of the cheese makers in lower New England eventually moved north, where things were less expensive.

One Cheshire cheese tale: In 1802, a group of cheese makers in the Berkshires decided to congratulate then-President Thomas Jefferson by making and sending him a 1,235-pound cheese wheel of Cheshire. (A pastor leading the charge had campaigned for Jefferson and supported his belief in the separation of church and state.) They used milk from all the cheese factories in the region, Civitello said, and built a giant cheese press for the project. They floated the resulting wheel down the Hudson, and the cheese eventually made it to the lawn of the White House, where people came from miles around to take a chunk home.

Learning about Cheshire, Civitello said, “I thought to myself: This is interesting because not a lot of people make this cheese. It was once really popular, so it should continue to be popular. There’s only one producer that really exports from the U.K. over here (now); it’s a very good cheese, but it’s very expensive. It’s upwards of like $42 a pound at retail.

“So I thought I might have a little room to launch this style of cheese that’s gone out of favor. And it has historical roots in New England. So that’s kind of important to us as Connecticut cheese makers to revive a cheese that had gone away.”

The Gray has indeed proven popular with Mystic Cheese Company customers. For the past decade, Melinda Mae, a Robiola-style cheese, has been the organization’s best-seller. For the first time in the history of the company, The Gray, which was launched about a year ago, is now outselling Melinda Mae.

Why call it The Gray? Mystic Cheese Company tends to name its cheeses for whales because of the Mystic connection. Finback, for example, is one.

“We’ve kind of run with the whaling theme since the start of the company,” Civitello said.

In describing The Gray, Civitello said, “It’s creamy and crumbly at the same time, which is an interesting way to describe something. And (it’s) very buttery and savory and almost a little bit juicy. It’s more acidic than a cheddar, so when I say juicy, it almost draws the moisture out of your mouth. It’ll make you salivate a little from the acidity and the salt. Because of that, it has, I think, a very addictive quality. I find New Englanders in specific like this style of cheese because a lot of us grew up on very sharp cheddar.”

He suggested eating The Gray in chunks — taking a fork or knife and lopping off a piece — and he said it’s also wonderful with something sweet like jam or honey.

A nomadic herdsman

Civitello, 46, grew up “basically doing the farming lifestyle” on a 50-acre farm in Salem where his family raised cows and pigs and grew hay.

“I took my interest in cheese, and I moved overseas in my 20s. I lived in Italy for a number of years, and I learned to make cheese over there. If you want to learn the technical side of cheese making, there are very few places you can go in America,” he said.

There are short courses here, but unless he was going to go to, say, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, there weren’t many options. Civitello said there are, though, more now than there were 20 years when he was interested in doing this.

In any case, he spent about a year in northern Italy making Parmigiano Reggiano.

Then, Civitello went into the Alps to do something called transhumance.

“It’s an ancient tradition of taking a group of animals up an alp, and you follow the melting snow and the grass grows when the snow melts. You basically are just short of a nomadic herdsman,” he said.

“You’re making cheese out in the open sometimes … And you basically live this lifestyle of being with those animals on a mountain. You follow the season. As the snow melts, you go to the top of the mountain. In September and October, the snow starts coming and you start bringing the animals back down.

“It’s a lifestyle that these people choose to make. It’s disappearing all over the world because the younger generation is not really interested in doing it. I mean, it’s hard. Not a daily shower. You’re out in the open. Sometimes, you have a small stone chalet that you can live in for a little bit, where you might hide some cheese, and then you have to hike back up and down the mountain to care for the cheeses that are at lower elevations, and you go back and forth. I was probably in the best shape of my life.”

Civitello spent one full season doing that and also lived as a shepherd in the south of Italy, doing something similar.

“I’ve been blessed with being able to have those experiences. Living both of those lifestyles, there’s no clocks, no sense of what day it is today,” he said, adding that, of course, there were no computers or cellphones either.

He came back to southeastern Connecticut because he wanted to be with his grandparents, who were getting older.

After they both passed away, Civitello moved around the country a bit and worked at some cheese factories. But he always ended up back here, knowing he’d want to start his own company someday. And he did, establishing Mystic Cheese Company with Jason Sobocinski out of a shipping container in Lebanon in 2013 and then opening the company’s current home in Groton in 2019.

From milk to cheese

Mystic Cheese Company gets its milk from Kingswood Farm in Brooklyn, Conn., which is run by the Ennis family. They milk a herd of purebred Ayrshire cows, which Civitello noted is a very non-modern breed of dairy. It was a Scottish breed that was abundant in the area in the northern U.K. where they made Cheshire cheese.

A lot of modern dairy breeds are bred for making milk for drinking, which requires a different result.

“Cheese makers are interested in higher fat, higher protein. We want very rich milk because we want to extract those proteins and those fats to make the richest, most flavorful product,” Civitello said.

Mystic Cheese Company sells its products at various farmers markets, including those in Ledyard and Lyme. Check their website at mysticcheese.co for details.

They also distribute their cheese around the state, and they distribute nationally along the Eastern Seaboard, as well as the West Coast, the Chicago area and Texas.

Pineapple cheese

Now back to that intriguingly named pineapple cheese: Mystic Cheese Company is on the verge of that as its next resurgence project.

Connecticut had the first original American cheese in the country’s history, Civitello noted. In the Goshen/Cornwall area of the state in 1807, Lewis Norton created something he called pineapple cheese. It was essentially a cheddar style of cheese that was pressed into the shape of a pineapple.

The pineapple was a symbol of welcoming, and Norton wanted to make something unique that could be given as a gift.

“It started out as something kind of gimmicky and small. And then it became the first factory that made cheese in all of America,” Civitello said.

The business grew, and as things got more expensive, Norton moved the factory to New York, where there were advantages like more access to railways.

He eventually sold his business to Kraft, which held the patent on this particular cheese until recently. With the patent now expired, “Mystic Cheese is going to bring back the pineapple cheese, which is the Connecticut original,” Civitello said.

They are hoping to roll it out next year.

Civitello actually remembers first reading about pineapple cheese back when he was getting his bachelor’s degree in agricultural economics at the University of Connecticut.

Why cheese?

Asked why he wanted to make cheese, Civitello said, “It’s such a unique profession because cheese making is the culmination of what’s happening at a farm, what the animals are eating, what the climate is at the farm. The time of year changes the milk.”

A cheese maker, he said, can learn all kinds of things from the smell or the look of milk. So there are elements of farming and science in cheese making. With Mystic Cheese Company, there is also physical movement since the folks there make cheese by hand.

“I joke around that we’re in the business of dehydration because we’re condensing all this farm activity, this milk, into this beautiful product that shouldn’t really exist,” Civitello said. “We take the most fragile, perishable thing in the world — milk — and we turn it into something that can be delicious over one or two or even three years. It’s this controlled fermentation that we take something that can be flavorless and perishable, and we change it into something magical.”

k.dorsey@theday.com

Where to buy Mystic Cheese Company products

Mystic Cheese Company cheese can be found locally at Fiddleheads Food Co-op in New London, Hunts Brook Farm in Quaker Hill, Holmberg Orchards in Gales Ferry, Stone Acres Farm in Stonington, Smith’s Acres in Niantic, Spencer and Lynn Wines in Mystic, and McQuade’s Marketplace in Mystic and Westerly.

They are also at farmers markets in Lyme and Ledyard.

Visit Mystic Cheese Company’s website at mysticcheese.co for more information.