In 2019 a small creamery in Central Point, Oregon beat 3,800 cheeses in Bergamo and became the first American cheese ever named World Champion. You can drive to it, and it is open seven days a week.

It started as relief work. In 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression, an entrepreneur from Portland worked with the city of Central Point to set up southern Oregon’s first artisan creamery cooperative — the Rogue River Valley Co-op — for the specific purpose of keeping local dairy farmers solvent. The legendary cheesemaker Tom Vella arrived two years later, in 1935, and with a partner turned the cooperative into a working cheese factory. (Vella is often given as the 1933 founder; the creamery’s own history separates the two dates, and the distinction matters — the co-op was a rescue, and the factory was what the rescue made possible.) He brought back mold, cultures and recipes from Roquefort, which is why an Oregon town has been making blue cheese for ninety years.

The wins came much later and there are two of them, sixteen years apart. In 2003 Rogue River Blue became the first non-European blue cheese ever to take “World’s Best Blue Cheese” and Reserve Champion overall at the World Cheese Awards. In 2019, in Bergamo, it went one better and was named World Champion outright — the first American-made cheese ever to hold the title, chosen from 3,800 entries.

The catch is worth knowing before you plan around it. Rogue River Blue is not a cheese you can simply turn up and buy: the wheels are wrapped in leaves, aged, and released for sale nearly a year later, timed to the autumnal equinox. Arrive in spring and you will be eating something else — which, given a ninety-year back catalogue of blues and cheddars, is not much of a hardship.

What you can rely on is the shop itself, at 311 North Front Street on old Highway 99, open 10am to 5pm seven days a week, where the counter runs to curds, wheels and a grilled cheese. The building announces itself with a hand-painted wall reading The Maker of Oregon Blue Cheese, which has the flat confidence of a sign painted long before anyone in Bergamo had heard of the place. Rogue Creamery is also Oregon’s first certified B Corporation, a designation it worked out with the state under then-Secretary of State Kate Brown — an unusual thing to find attached to a small-town creamery, and a fair signal of how the place is run.