No more cheese for you

Late Monday sad news. The Facebook page mumbled something about a medical emergency but Sheri LaVigne, whose sweet countenance graced a new location on Capitol Hill, has called it quits. You may already know her from Calf & Kid, a wondrous cheese shop in the Melrose Market. Now she's using her expertise and connections to source the cheese (and other delectables) at Culture Club, in one of the Hill's new apartment blocks.

For a lot of people, cheese is replete with mystery. Fake cheese is kind of like bad wine: cheap and artificial. Real cheese is packed with flavor, full of the subtlety of its origins (like the terroir of a fine wine), with the additional complexity of the cheese-making process itself.

Artisanal trumps industrial every time: quirky, changing with the seasons, dependent on weather, on aging conditions, and so on. There are different styles of cheese (fresh, soft rind, hard rind, washed rind, and so on) produced from lactating animals as different as goats and buffalo. Portable protein; cheese is easier to carry than milk.

At Culture Club, there were a few prepared dishes, like mac & cheese and grilled cheese sandwiches, but the stars are the wine & cheese pairings. Three cheeses (goat, cow, sheep) paired with three wines (red, white, or sparkling), alongside crackers and jam. These aren't cheap, and why should they be? They're an extraordinary lesson, a graduate course in both geography and sensory appreciation.

How else would you even discover a cheese called Harbison, a soft-ripened cow's cheese with a "bloomy" rind wrapped in tree bark? Yes, Kurt Farm Shop, sells its magnificent Camembert-style Dinah's Cheese just down the street, and it's as good as you'll find in western Washington. But this creamy Harbison, from Jasper Hill Farm in rural Vermont, is transcendent. It's paired with a lively Côtes du Rhône from Domaine Janasse, and that's just the first of three "courses."

Her wine advisor was longtime collaborator Peter Moore, co-owner of Capitol Hill's intimate tapas bar Poco Wine & Spirits, at 14th & Pine. LaVigne herself is optimistic, generous, and dedicated to spreading the gospel of cheese. "Every cheese tells a story," she says. And no two cheeses were alike. Seattle is a lesser place this evening.