Laura Chenel

Laura Chenel (born 1948–1949)^[1] is a cheese maker who was America's first commercial producer of goat cheese, and helped to popularize goat cheese in America. In 1979, she began producing chèvre in the Bay Area town of Sebastopol, California, after a fact-finding trip to visit goat cheese producers in France. After several months of working to sell her product to local markets (with mixed success, due to American unfamiliarity with goat cheeses at the time), she received her first major opportunity when Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California placed a standing order for her cheese in 1980. Waters listed the cheese by name on her menu (as "Laura Chenel's Chèvre", in what may have been the first American instance of goat cheese salad), which provided Chenel with a great deal of publicity. Eventually, her operation would grow to sell over two million pounds of cheese per year.^[2] The company primarily manufactures fresh chèvre, although aged cheeses make up roughly 10% of its business. In 2006, Chenel sold the company to the Rians Group fr, a French corporation which has purchased multiple small farming operations, while retaining ownership of her herd of five hundred goats.^[1]

In 1968, during her senior year of high school, Chenel traveled across Europe as an exchange student in Holland, Netherlands, and was exposed to new cultures including that of Indonesia, where her host family had once lived. When she returned to the United States, she enrolled at the University of California at Santa Cruz to study anthropology. A year year, she decided to move to San Francisco and then New York City in search of a “more urban environment.”^[3]

In 1973 or 1974, Chenel was living in Manhattan, and decided to move back to her parent’s Sebastopol property after her restauranteur father, who was also a reading teacher at Rancho Cotati High School, was granted a sabbatical. Her parents travelled to Europe, while she ran their restaurant. The family lived on a turkey ranch with a big vegetable garden, and the restaurant had started as Vast’s Turkey Land, serving smoked turkeys and other meats. Right next to the restaurant, behind the garage was an enclosed area that Chenel had fixed up. Her first goats were a couple of kids. She bred them upon maturity and when they had kids, she used their milk to make yogurt and kefir.^[4]

Overtime, she had more goats, and approached the Redwood Empire Dairy Goat Association (REDGA) with the proposition to make cheese from the milk that would otherwise be discarded. Together with the association, Chenel formed a cooperative. She drove to San Francisco cheese stores, particularly Sacramento, Berkeley, to understand their requirements and finally, met the cooperative in a Safeway parking lot in Sonoma County with cans of milk from her goats. David Viviani of the Sonoma Cheese Factory used the milk to make goat jack, a semi-soft cheese known for its creamy, mild, and slightly sweet flavour.^[5][4] Chenel then took the jack to the stores she had previously visited.

When a clerk at the Say Cheese on San Francisco’s Cole Street introduced Chenel to fresh french cheese, made from raw milk and coated in ash, she realized that it tasted different and “so much better” than the usual jack. She started looking for someone who could teach her how to make it. She enrolled at the Sonoma State University to study the French language for a year, where one of her professors, Adele Friedman, helped her write to Jean-Claude Le Jaouen expressing her interest in learning how to make goat cheese. Le Jaouen was the head of the L'Institut Technique de l'Elevage Ovin et Caprin (ITOVIC), Paris and author of The Fabrication of Farmstead Goat Cheese (1990). He responded to Chenel’s request, saying that he could “help her find something” and asked her to “just show up.”^[4] In 1979, she spent three and a half months in France, apprenticing with with four farmstead cheesemakers across Angoulême, Carcassonne and Joigny.^[3]

Chenel returned from France with mold specimens from every place she had stayed at. In 1979, she was living with her goats on Vine Hill Road in Sonoma Country, close to the Dehlinger Winery. She set up the basement of her house to make cheese but was initially unsuccessful. "There were years of established bacteria there, more virulent than the natural cheese bacteria I was attempting to encourage," she explained.^[3] A month and a half later, the bacteria finally settled, and the cheese began to form the "correct taste and texture."^[3] She made ash-coated chabis and pyramids, as well as crottin from blue mold that would get “very hard and dry.” She started selling her products at farmers markets, and due to lack of persistent market demand, pivoted to experimenting with white mold. It was the eight ounce chèvre that put Chenel on the map after Alice Waters, American chef and the owner of Chez Panisse, tried the cheese at one of the farmers' markets in 1981. She began sourcing 50 pounds of chèvre a week for a now-signature salad recipe that included breaded and baked discs of Chenel's cheese on a bed of mesclun greens.^[6][7][8] The same year, Chenel moved to Ridley Avenue in Santa Rosa, California, where Francois Picard ran a snail company, Enfant Riant. She converted the former food processing plant to make cheese. She spent the next twelve years at the Ridley factory, and gave up her goats due to lack of time commitment. “I had a certain absolute standard about what had to happen for them and I was so into this cheese that I couldn’t do it,” she said.^[4][9]

Roberta Klugman, who worked at a retail shop for Chenel’s cheese and with a distributor for Chenel in the 1980’s recalled that her goat cheese "reigned supreme along with the Montrachet." However, domestic goat cheese in America was still a hard sell. According to Klugman, there was a "great enthusiasm for supporting Californian and American producers but for the most part restaurants still wanted to stay with the French products."^[8] By the mid-1990s, goat cheese grew in popularity, and Chenel's company started selling over 2 million pounds of cheese annually.^[8]

It wasn’t until she moved back to Sonoma County in 1993 that Chenel realized she could have goats again. She took over the former Clover-Stornetta Farms bottling plant to "boost production and consolidate her herd of goats."^[9] In 1995, she started with 12 goats, then got another 20, and then another 60. She found them from across Wyoming, South Dakota, and Idaho. She recalled that a woman from South Dakota picked up goats for her while driving down and stopping along the way. The first goats of her new herd were saanens. Eventually, she added more breeds, including anglo-nubians,toggenburgers, alpines, and American lamanchas, growing her hers to 500 goats.^[3]

In October 2005, Chenel received a cold call from someone hired by Hugues Triballat of Rians International in France. He had been selling a few of his cheese products in America and wanted to further expand within the American market. Triballet and Chenel met two months later to discuss a potential sale. While Chenel wasn't interested in selling when Rians first approached her, she was impressed by Triballat's "attention to quality and craft."^[9] Speaking about her motivation to sell, she later said: "I didn’t know how to grow the business. I think I was really good for starting it but I’m too hands-on; it couldn’t expand the way it needed to. I had learned in France and I have always had a deep belief that France is the home of all this. I put my California perspective on it but for me the ideal is the French. Goat cheese is in their psyche; they know it in all its forms. I understood that when I was there and I wanted to translate that into something that could be my artistic expression in the world. I started to realize I was getting to the end of my time, that I had done what I wanted to do. The company had grown, and always, as long as my name was on the cheese, I had a huge weight on me. So I was obsessive about it. I would go into the plant when everyone was gone. I was hovering, all the time. I had to stop."^[3]

The sale was finalized in 2006 for an undisclosed amount, with Rians purchasing all of the vats, pasteurizers, packaging lines and other equipment from Chenel's Stornetta plant. She retained her herd of 500 goats and sold their milk to Rians. Her team of 18 employees stayed on with the new owner, and Rians continued to lease the 15-acres former milk dairy and bottling owned by the Stornetta family until 2011.^[9] By 2023, in addition to buying goat milk from eight farms in California, Oregon, Nevada and Idaho, Rians was looking to expand their dairy-base to meet customer demands.^[10]

Chenel has been in a relationship with John Van Dyke, former cheesemaker and general manager of her company, since the late-1990s. As of 2007, she lives in the hills above Sonoma Valley, and spends her time gardening and tending to her goat herd.^[3][11]

• List of cheesemakers

• Official website
• Biography at starchefs.com
• Article at epicurean.com