Don De Bernardi has been in the milk business in Petaluma for more than five decades. His enterprise, the De Bernardi Dairy, milks 700 Holsteins and a few Jerseys for an organic-milk cooperative.
You might think that, at 74, De Bernardi would be cruising toward retirement. Instead, he has become one of the state's newest cheesemakers, producing an aged raw-milk goat cheese that is selling faster than he can make it.
Like several American cheesemakers' stories, this one started with pet goats – a pair of does (female goats) that Don's wife, Bonnie, bought to amuse her grandsons. That was 15 years ago. Eventually Bonnie bred the does and began milking them. The herd grew, and the milk supply along with it.
About a half dozen years ago, Don and Bonnie went to Switzerland to visit Don's numerous cousins. Both his father and his maternal grandparents immigrated from the Ticino, one of Switzerland's Italian-speaking cantons. None of those cousins makes cheese today, but the prior generation did, so Don and Bonnie spent some time in the high Alps watching the local people make goat cheese.
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