Excerpted from Sunset in a Glass: Adventures of a Food and Wine Road Warrior in Spain By Gerry Dawes ©2021
John Mariani´s Virtual Gourmet
THE CHEESES OF ASTURIAS
The people of Asturias, Spain, proudly call their land a Paraiso de los Quesos (cheese paradise). Outside the main cities, farms—with their cows, goats and sheep—enable the production of a wide variety of cheeses, which has helped create an economic engine that has prevented the depopulation of many small townships in the region.
González is a taciturn man who speaks
Spanish with a Medieval Asturian village accent
that requires concentration to interpret
sometimes. With his low-key, but expert,
commentary along the way I was led through a
remarkable series of cheese-related adventures by
a man who is obviously profoundly in love with his
Asturian homeland.
González left the family farm and attended
law school before deciding to dedicate himself to
reviving the traditional, often nearly extinct,
cheeses of Asturias, beginning with his own
family’s made in his home village. He began to
market the artisan cheeses of some 40 small
producers for whom selling their cheeses outside
the region was nearly impossible. By 2010,
they were billing nearly $6 million of food
products and built a large new facility near
Siero, outside Oviedo, to keep the cheeses in
acclimated chambers for a curing process known as
afinaje.
Since I
first met González in the early 2000s he has
taught me everything that I know about the
Asturias—its cheeses and its other regional
products: fabada
Asturiana (the Asturian national bean dish),
artisanal sidras
(apple cider) and Calvados-like apple brandies.
In 2005, I made my first visit to Asturias
since 1971, meeting González in the Picos de
Europa mountains, then driving to the
dramatic Desfiladero
de Los Beyos canyon and up into the hills to
visit his family home. There his sister Aurora
produces 
On several outings, I visited a number of
cheese producers who work with González in Arenas de
Cabrales, where he showed me Cabrales
cheese production and how a thin length of bone is
used to bore into the cheese, a sample of which is
extracted and smelled to judge how the cheese is
developing. We sampled González’s Cabrales,
laced with a blue Roquefort-like benign mold that
imparts a strong, spicy flavor.
In
2010, I visited the lively Sunday morning market
in Cangas
de Onís, where cheeses, sausages, beans,
vegetables, cider and more are spread across
several blocks and augmented by the local
specialty food shops, some offering more than two
dozen local cheeses. In the west near Áviles,
close to the Cantabrian Sea, I sampled the cow’s
milk blue La
Peral and the unique piquant paprika-laced Afuega’l Pitu
(“fire-in-the-throat”). I tasted three types of
raw milk goat’s cheese made by Jesús Gutiérrez and
his son Manuel in the tiny rural Peñamellera
Baja community of Buelles along the
Cares-Deva River.
On six other trips
ranging from 2006 until 2017 I made other forays
with Marino González into Asturias and visited
another dozen artisan cheese producers under his
guidance. My stay at the Heredad de la
Cueste in Llenín was part of another
remarkable three-day Asturian adventure during the
last days of October 2012. On that trip, I
returned with Jaime Rodríguez to visit Rosa Maria
Intriago, after she had moved part of her
cheese-curing operation up to a vast, newly
utilized cave supervised by the Consejo
Regulador (Regulatory Council) of the Denominación
de Origen.
Known as Cueva Oscura
(Dark Cave) and long used as a refuge by hunters,
the cave is up in the puerto, a
mountain pass in the Picos de
Europa near the hamlet of Avín (population
about 130).
When Rodríguez and I visited the cave, we
found Rosa Intriago stacking her Gamonéu
cheeses on shelves for curing. There was a
brochure about the new cheese-producing cave with
admonitions about fotografía
prohibida (photography prohibited) and signs
that said it was prohibited for anyone to be in
the caves who did not have an official reason to
be there. But I was with Rodríguez, Intriago and
other Gamonéu
producers who were members of the Regulatory
Council and no one seemed to care that I was
taking photographs, so I took several, knowing
that I would not be coming back to the 
The great blue cheese Cabrales,
the best-known of all Asturian cheeses (and second
only to Manchego
among Spanish cheeses), is usually easy to find in
good cheese outlets in America. Importers and
stores such as Despana Brands, La Tienda, Michelle
Buster’s Forever Cheese, Artisanal Premium Cheese
Center, Whole Foods, Zabar’s and many other
American outlets carry these cheeses.
Along with Cabrales,
the other major Asturian blue cheeses are Gamonéu,
La Peral
and Monje
Blue. Valdeòn,
the blue cheese from the Castilla y
Leòn side of the Picos de
Europa, is available in top cheese stores in
the American and European markets. So are Los Beyos,
an I.G.P. (Protected Geographical Indication)
available in milk from cows, ewes and goats; La Collada,
a brand of Marino González’s family cheese also
available as “Tres Leches,”
(mixed milk); Afuega’l Pitu
(cows’ milk), and the Penamellera
Alta cheese La Cueva
Llonin (mixed milk).
Excerpted from Sunset in a Glass: Adventures of a Food and Wine Road Warrior in Spain
By Gerry Dawes ©2021
More true than Don Quixote's vapouring?
Hath winged Pegasus more nobly trod
Than Rocinante stumbling up to God?
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