{ FOOD&WINE }

R. Kent Torrey stands molded into one of the nooks that shape the rear end of his homage to fromage, fine wine and gourmet foods, surrounded by prizes drawn from a globe-trotting grand gastronomy of “fermentation science,” as he likes to call it. He is smiling slyly, happy about being able to Google two words – cheese and shop – and see The Carmel Cheese Shop come out on top.

Actually, the top space on Google alternates between Carmel’s curd capitol and another big time cheese shop located across the country. The next five placements hold steady with the classic Monty Python sketch “The Cheese Shop,” then another string of emporia continues onto the second page of listings. The great thing, Torrey explains, is that all of those other celebrated cheese businesses are in major cities.

“What makes this place so unique and what really turns on visitors, especially Europeans, is that we are basically a little village cheese shop, just like they are used to seeing back home,” Torrey eagerly expounds.

Torrey is always eagerly expounding, his bright eyes twinkling in rhythm with his streaming consciousness. As he likes to say: “We are about education here. If you come in and tell one of us that you love a sharp cheddar for instance, we won’t just taste you on that, or a couple of sharp cheddars, we’ll have you also try maybe a sharp provolone, a sharp aged gouda, a sharp gorgonzola, and try to help you expand your understanding and experience.”

Torrey recounts the days when “we used to have to get trucks from back East to make special trips to provide us the cheese we wanted.

“There just wasn’t anything like this out here,” he says. “The food distributors didn’t have those kinds of products.” The artisan products The Cheese Shop carries will startle the average person. The depth and breadth of selections – things like Cotswold, an English classic, or Garrotxa, Spanish goat’s milk cheese from Catalonia wrapped in maple leaves – is so vast that it forces you to surrender yourself to these cheese wizards. Their experience and wisdom magically transform you.

The shop itself has wisdom and experience, born of decades of continuity. It feels like a cave inside and in some ways it is – the walls having formed over time from seemingly natural outcroppings, stalactital shingles strewn surreptitiously over time until totally surrounding its contented contents like a cocoon. People feel good in here. They come from all over, seekers of cheese and wine nirvana, discovering answers to questions they didn’t know they had.

Michael Burke has seen them come. It was his sister and brother-in-law, Nancy and John McCormack, who opened this shop back in 1975. “I laid that floor right there,” recalls Burke, pointing to a stout looking tiled foundation upon which hordes have trod. “The store only came up to here,” he says, showing where the old wall ends and the “new” one (it expanded in 1978) begins. “There was a restaurant next door that went back here. They sold wine retail, so we sold mostly cheese back then,” Burke continues, “but the restaurant started fading and we increased our wines, ultimately taking over completely.”

Wine now comprises more than half of The Cheese Shop’s business. “We were the first retailers to sell Randy Dunn’s [Dunn Howell Mountain Cabernet]. We sold something like 130 cases that first year we carried it. We were Dan Duckhorn’s [of Duckhorn Vineyards] first account,” recalls Michael, whose connection to winemakers and winemaking extends beyond that of buying and selling. He is a fairly renown local winemaker himself with his own label, White Barn Vineyards. Burke continues on, memories running free like first pressings after a big harvest: “I made the first Pisoni Vineyard Pinot, back in 1992. Gary was selling his grapes to Cloninger where they were being blended. I made a straight Pisoni Pinot that won a house tasting against a group of top Burgundies.”

It is those far-reaching ties to the world of wine and food that distinguish The Cheese Shop. Torrey, who became first an employee in 1986, then an owner in 1999, counts Master of Wine Larry Stone a good friend, among others. Torrey and Burke were both regular fixtures at past Masters of Food and Wine events, helping with wine duties and developing close friendships with the best and the brightest in the industry.

When Torrey began his elaborate cheese display at the Masters, it inspired other top events (like the World of Pinot and the upcoming Pebble Beach Food and Wine) to enlist his expertise as both a presenter and lecturer.

Over the years many celebrities and corporate honchos have been regulars at The Cheese Shop. “Ansel Adams came in all the time,” Burke reminisces. “His favorite was a pungent camembert.” Like Torrey’s, Burke’s eyes sparkle with a certain jolliness – come to think of it, everyone who works here exhibits similar symptoms, as if they’re all in on a private joke. Could it be that prolonged exposure to cheese spores brings on a type of euphoria? That humans might find true happiness through a deeper association with cheese?

Perhaps Steffan Sur Schackman, yet another fascinating Cheese Shop employee, would be someone to ask. A trained chef who runs his own catering business and helps design and maintain the shop’s website and computers, Sur has crafted all the intriguing, original shelving and display cases from wine boxes. It is easy to envision him contemplating the interrelationship between cheese and mood while happily reshaping a box of first growth Bordeaux.

Their mood is contagious – leaving The Cheese Shop feels like emerging from a dream. It’s a dream in which happy elves scurry to and fro sprinkling cheese dust on enchanted visitors, who in turn leave laden with delights from around the universe.

The Cheese Shop

Carmel Plaza, Ocean and Junipero, Carmel. • 10am-6pm Mon-Sat, 11am- 5:30pm Sun. • 625-2272 or cheeseshopcarmel.com