By Tonya Harmon—

When we arrived in San Miguel de Allende in June 2022, there was one thing I truly missed: good, locally made, European-style artisan cheese.

I resigned myself to buying imported cheeses at La Comer and City Market, supplemented by the occasional treasures I carried home from the United States, France, or Italy. At the time, I knew very little about Mexican cheese. I knew only that I did not particularly enjoy the commercial varieties I had encountered in grocery stores.
Cheese, however, had already been part of my life for decades. After leaving my software company in 2008, I began a journey to learn as much about it as I could. It was the natural continuation of a long love affair with cheese that had begun in France, a country where my family and I have spent a month or more nearly every year for decades.

I studied the science and technology of cheesemaking at the University of Guelph. Later, I travelled through Tuscany, learning to make cheese with shepherdesses across the region. I consumed countless books on the subject and eventually decided that our next great venture should be to buy a dairy in Ontario, Canada, and make cheese ourselves.

Then I visited the dairies that were for sale and spoke with the cheesemakers who operated them. It did not take long to realize that the supposedly Zen-like life of stirring curds and whey seven days a week was not for me. Still, I loved the subject. I continued studying cheese without knowing where that knowledge might lead—and, honestly, without caring very much. I simply loved learning everything I could about it.

An Unlikely Cheese Pilgrimage
The following May, I saw a flyer advertising a National Wine and Cheese Festival in Tequisquiapan. The information was remarkably vague. There were no clear dates, no reliable schedule, and little indication of precisely where or when the festival would take place. The admission price was not listed. Online, the information was even less helpful and appeared to have been left over from the previous year.

On a warm Saturday morning, my husband and I decided to take our chances. We drove approximately two hours, past the Querétaro airport, expecting to find a small local festival featuring the same Mexican cheeses I had already decided I was never going to appreciate.

I was wrong.
We arrived around eleven in the morning, parked, and began walking. Our route took us past a long indoor Mexican market packed with people and overflowing with baskets, dolls, brooms, hardware, fresh produce, and almost anything else one could imagine.

A few blocks later, we emerged into the picturesque central square, surrounded by an imposing parish church and lovely boutiques selling jewelry, pottery, clothing, and local crafts. Then we began noticing the cheese shops. They appeared one after another along the side streets, their windows and counters filled with cheeses in an extraordinary variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and textures. Most were completely unfamiliar to me, but they were clearly not the standard commercial cheeses I had seen at La Comer.

My curiosity took over. I fell for the beautiful displays, photographed everything, and tried desperately to understand what the shopkeepers were telling me. My Spanish was limited, my knowledge of Mexican cheese was even more limited, and our phones could not find an internet connection.

This was not San Miguel. We were on our own. Eventually, after wandering around town, we located the festival grounds in a large park several blocks from the center. The entire park was surrounded by a high stone wall, and we could not find an open entrance. After walking almost all the way around it, we finally learned that the festival would not begin until one o’clock.

When the gates eventually opened, we paid the 300-peso admission charge and were each handed a wineglass for the tastings.
We could hear the festival before we entered. Loud music vibrated through the park, which was rapidly filling with stylish young Mexicans enjoying the live performances. Around its perimeter, vendors offered tastings and sold wine, beer, food—and, most importantly, cheese.

We spent the afternoon moving from booth to booth and buying as much cheese as we could carry back to the car. The producers were knowledgeable, professional, and extraordinarily generous. They offered tastings, pairings, and demonstrations, despite our very limited ability to understand their explanations. The greatest surprise was the cheese itself.

Much of it was made in recognizable European traditions: fresh chèvres, creamy Camembert- and Brie-style wheels, smooth aged cheeses reminiscent of Comté, and beautiful cheeses made from goat’s and sheep’s milk.

It was heaven. I bought hundreds of dollars’ worth—not out of restraint or reason, but from curiosity, desire, and the fear that I might never find any of it again in San Miguel. That fear was not entirely misplaced. To this day, I have not found many of those particular cheeses for sale here.

A Gold Mine Hiding in Plain Sight
During the week following the festival, I tried to contact the cheesemakers. I emailed them. I sent messages in Spanish through Facebook and WhatsApp. I explained that I loved their cheeses and wanted to find a way to buy them in San Miguel.

I did not receive a single response. So I began investigating on my own. I searched their websites, learned everything I could about the producers and their cheeses, and began researching the larger history of cheesemaking in Mexico. It felt as though I had discovered a gold mine hiding in plain sight: a remarkable artisan-cheese culture that many people in San Miguel did not seem to know existed.
Meanwhile, I still had a cooler filled with marvelous cheese. What was I going to do with all of it?

I posted on Facebook, inviting people to come taste the cheeses and hear what I had learned about Mexico’s fascinating history of European-style cheesemaking. Within hours, more than one hundred people had responded. And so my “cheese classes” began. I assumed I would teach one or two classes, satisfy everyone’s curiosity, and be finished with it. Instead, three years later, requests for new classes continue to arrive almost daily.

Perhaps that should not surprise me. Cheese combines fat, salt, aroma, texture, fermentation, history, memory, and pleasure in a way few other foods can. It brings people to the table before they have even decided to sit down.

Discovering Mexican Cheese
Since that first festival, I have learned an enormous amount about the cheeses made in Mexico. I have also developed a much deeper appreciation for traditional Mexican cheeses as well as their European-style counterparts.

I had initially dismissed Mexican cheese based on a handful of commercial products. What I discovered was an astonishingly varied world of small dairies, family farms, dedicated cheesemakers, regional traditions, native recipes, European influences, and new experimentation.

I have now found many exceptional cheeses made much closer to home. Some follow French, Italian, or Spanish traditions; others are unmistakably Mexican. The best reflect the milk, animals, climate, landscape, and personality of the people who make them.
Mexican artisan cheese is delicious, distinctive, and still woefully underrepresented in a community with an apparently insatiable appetite for it. The subject is endless, which is precisely what I love about it. There is always another history to uncover, another farm to visit, another cheesemaker to meet, another wheel to taste, and another way to serve it.

My goal has always been to connect cheese lovers with these extraordinary products and introduce them to the tireless farmers, shepherds, and cheesemakers behind them.

I never did buy that dairy in Ontario. Instead, cheese found another use for me.

To book your cheese experience:
Empress of Cheese EmpressofCheese.com

Cheeses to try:
La Estrella’s creamy, rich fresh goat cheese, made at the highly acclaimed artisanal urban farm.

On Stirling Dickinson:
La Factoría’s Criollo – A smooth, semi-mature cow’s milk cheese with a consistency made for slicing and melting.

You can find these at Luna se Queso:
Del Rebaño OVNI — A sheep’s-milk cheese with a creamy interior and a white-mold rind. It was created by Gaby, the master cheesemaker and a former gold-medal winner at the International Cheese Awards.

Banon-style cheese — An artisanal goat’s-milk cheese inspired by the classic cheese from Provence. Made in Jalisco, it is wrapped in grapevine leaves and tied with string.

Del Rebaño Padua — A sheep’s-milk cheese with a creamy consistency and qualities similar to French camembert.