On July 8, a five-person cheesemaking team on the shore of Lake Michigan found out their sheep’s milk cheese had just beaten out nearly all of North America. Artze, made by Blakesville Creamery in Port Washington, Wisconsin, took Second Place Best of Show at the 2026 American Cheese Society Judging & Competition, one of just two cheeses singled out from more than 1,600 entries. Here’s the story of the farm, the cheesemaker, and the cheese itself.
A Dairy Farm’s Second Act
Blakesville Creamery didn’t start out as a creamery at all. In 2012, Lynde Uihlein, a longtime advocate for land conservation in southeast Wisconsin, was offered the chance to buy her neighbor’s farm: a property that had raised dairy cows for three generations before it went up for sale. Uihlein bought it, but not to keep milking cows. She wanted to turn it into something new: a sustainable goat dairy.
The farm carried the name Afterglow Dairy Farm for its first several years, until 2019, when it was renamed Blakesville Dairy Farm in honor of a village that once stood on the same land. A year later, in 2020, Blakesville Creamery opened its doors next to the farm, turning that goat milk (and eventually sheep’s milk from a neighboring producer) into handcrafted cheese. You can read more about how the farm and creamery fit together on Blakesville’s own site, where Uihlein and her team describe the operation as much as a land-use project as a cheese business.
That framing matters, because it shows up in how the creamery talks about its own success. Owner Lynde Uihlein tied this year’s award directly back to that founding idea, crediting “the dedication of our farmers and cheesemakers together with our many industry partners who share our complementary commitments to thoughtful land use, environmental protection, and the creation of delicious food.” A cheese doesn’t win Best of Show by accident, but at Blakesville, it also isn’t the point on its own. It’s what happens when the land part gets done right first.
The Cheesemaker Who Found Her “Dreamery”
Behind Artze is Head Cheesemaker Veronica Pedraza, who brings nearly two decades of artisan cheesemaking experience to Blakesville. Before Wisconsin, she held cheesemaking and creamery leadership roles at Sweet Grass Dairy in Georgia, Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont, and Meadowood Farms in New York, picking up national awards at each stop along the way. She’s also worked the other side of the cheese counter, as a monger at Chicago’s All Together Now and Pastoral Artisan Cheese, and at Saxelby Cheesemongers in New York City, one of the most respected specialty cheese shops in the country.
That combination, cheesemaker and cheesemonger, tends to produce a particular kind of instinct: an understanding of not just how to make a good wheel, but how it needs to taste, look, and behave on an actual cheese counter months later. This year, Pedraza’s peers recognized that expertise directly. At the 2026 American Cheese Society Annual Conference, alongside the Artze win, she was inducted into the Guilde Internationale des Fromagers, an internationally respected society dedicated to advancing cheese knowledge and craftsmanship. In her own words after the win, Pedraza credited “my small, but mighty team of five for their hard work and dedication to our craft,” along with the farmers supplying the milk that makes the cheese possible in the first place.
What’s Actually in Artze
Artze is a soft-ripened lactic sheep’s milk cheese, meaning the curd is set slowly through bacterial culture rather than a fast rennet set, which is what gives soft-ripened cheeses like this their tangy, mousse-like paste. The rind is a Geotrichum candidum bloom, a cousin of the mold that gives Camembert its wrinkled, slightly ruffled white coat, and it’s entirely edible; if you want a refresher on which cheese rinds are meant to be eaten and which aren’t, our guide to cheese rinds walks through exactly that. What sets Artze apart is the finishing touch: a dusting of Piment d’Espelette, the mild, fruity chili pepper grown in the Basque Country of southwestern France, which gives the rind a faint red blush and a gentle, smoky warmth that plays against the cheese’s tangy interior.
The milk itself has its own story. It comes from Ms. J & Co. Dairy Farm in Juda, Wisconsin, founded by Senior Animal Scientist Mariana Marques de Almeida, whose flock of Assaf sheep, a breed prized specifically for cheesemaking, produces an unusually rich milk. Sheep’s milk runs higher in fat and protein than cow’s or even goat’s milk, which is part of why soft-ripened sheep cheeses tend to taste so much creamier than their texture alone would suggest. None of that richness happens without the farm behind it, which is exactly the point Blakesville keeps returning to: the cheese is only as good as the milk, and the milk is only as good as the animals and the people raising them.
A Big Week in Louisville
Winners of the 2026 American Cheese Society Judging & Competition were announced on July 8 at the Society’s Annual Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, after 42 judges worked through more than 1,600 entries from over 200 creameries across the Americas. You can see the full official results on the American Cheese Society’s site. Artze first won Gold in the Soft-Ripened with Flavor Added, All Milks category, which qualified it for the Best of Show round. From there, it placed Second overall, just behind Jasper Hill Farm’s Winnimere from Vermont.
Artze wasn’t the only Blakesville cheese to medal that week. St. Germain, a goat’s milk cheese aged more than 60 days, won Silver in its category, and Llanes, another soft-ripened sheep’s milk cheese, took Bronze. Stack that alongside the creamery’s record since 2022, 23 American Cheese Society awards in total, six World Championship Cheese Contest awards, two U.S. Championship Cheese Contest awards, and a Good Food Award, and this year’s Best of Show finish looks less like a lucky break and more like the result of a five-year-old creamery hitting its stride. If that kind of track record sounds familiar, it’s a similar pattern to what we saw in our spotlight on Point Reyes Farmstead, another small, family-led creamery whose consistency at competition has become part of its identity.
Bringing Artze to Your Table
If you track down a wheel of Artze, treat it the way you would any bloomy-rind cheese: pull it out of the fridge twenty to thirty minutes before serving so the paste has time to soften. The tanginess of the lactic curd and the gentle heat of the Piment d’Espelette both come through more clearly at room temperature than straight from the cold case. A crisp, dry white wine or a not-too-sweet cider makes a good match, since both have enough acidity to stand up to the cheese without fighting the pepper. If you’re building a full spread around it, our guide to building a cheese board has the basics on pairing it with something crisp, something sweet, and something to cut through the richness.
Because Artze is a limited, farmstead-scale cheese rather than something made by the truckload, availability will vary by season and by shop. Checking with a specialty cheese counter, or with Blakesville directly, is a better bet than expecting to find it at a regular grocery store.
Why Stories Like This Matter
Artze’s win is a genuinely good story on its own: a farm that changed its whole purpose, a cheesemaker who has spent twenty years learning both sides of the cheese counter, and a small team that just out-scored nearly everyone else in North America. But it’s also exactly the kind of story we want Nahitra to keep telling. Behind almost every wheel of great cheese is a specific farm, a specific person, and a specific set of decisions that most shoppers never hear about. This piece is part of an ongoing series profiling those people and the cheese they make, and we’ll keep adding to it. If you want to catch the next one, follow along on Pinterest and Instagram, or subscribe on the homepage to get new spotlights as they go up.
Marius R. | 8 min read
