Willamette Valley Cheese

You can sample anything/​everything they have in stock and the cheese is excellent! Could have bought way more if we weren’t flying home the next day.

I’m still watching to see if those poor cows ever get to graze in the adjacent pasture. Sadly, have yet to see a cow grazing in the adjacent pasture, and I have passed there another dozen times in the last couple of weeks.

The cheese is incredibly tasty. I recommend stopping in to taste or if you see them carried in a store to purchase some! Their tasting room is a little left to be desired… extremely tiny, not small, tiny — and if there are more than one party tasting it can become quite unorganized. I recommend going as soon as they open to get some one on one service.

My husband and I received some of their cheese for Christmas along with a voucher that notes «this voucher is good for a free cheese tasting in our tasting room…», «Voucher good for 2 persons». As I was checking their website today, looking forward to one day using the voucher, I was puzzled as it looked like the cheese tasting was free so wondered the value of the voucher.
I then checked out the Unilocal reviews and seen a negative review addressing these vouchers indicating they called the company about them and were told that yes, the cheese tasting is free, and the voucher really had no value but they handed them out with this information as «good business». No, that’s just being deceitful. Giving the impression that you were in possession of a voucher of value when in fact it is worth nothing, is just BAD business. A company that attempts to increase business with false advertising or deceiving information is not a company that deserves the public’s trust and patronage. Needless to say, we will no longer be planning a trip to Willamette Valley Cheese Co and will be passing on their ploy to everyone we know. I rarely post reviews but my biggest pet peeve is dishonesty.

The cheese was very tasty — lots of varieties to choose from. However the lady behind the counter had zero personality. What should have been a fun cheese tasting experience was made uncomfortable by her lack of social skills and personality. We would love to come back if another person was serving the cheese for tasting. If the same woman is there again we will stick to tasting cheese at Whole Foods. A small shop like this should be over the top super friendly and accommodating/​informative to customers if they want return business. Oh and the cows were so cute!!!

We had a great time and really enjoyed tasting their cheeses.
The young man that was working in the tasting room was very knowledgeable and had a great personality, he didn’t mind us asking a million questions and was able to answer all of them :-) I think we tried just about every cheese they had to offer.
We purchased a great variety of cheese to take with us on our road trip!

We drove about 12 hours today from California, a Saturday to patronize their cheese shop. My uncle and I do every year. To our dismay they wer closed and we believe we saw the person staffing the shop pull away as we pulled up. 4:12pm, websit states open till 5pm. We spent close to $ 300 in previous years and passed out to all our friends. Me thinks not any more, we will pass out beechers, cougar gold and some rogue creamery goodies… we won’t see you next year either. Thanks but no thanks

We first tried their cheese at the Portland State Farmer’s Market and loved so many of the cheeses that we wanted to go to the source. The gal at the counter could not have been less friendly. but the cheese is awesome!

We took a drive out here during a fun-​filled weekend getaway, and couldn’t have been happier with the experience. DLW loved seeing the cows, sheep and goats on the property (they only use cow’s milk for the cheese), and even more loved that she could get up close and even pet them. The cheese was also great. The woman running the tasting room let us try everything in the case, and answered every question DLW had in her foodie quest to know all things cheese. We left with a couple of pieces, which we devoured back home. If you’re in Salem, check this out.

Great cheese!!! The cranberry is amazing!!! Super nice and very informative!!! They even have papers on pairing your cheeses with food and drinks! Totally recommend this place to try some local cheese! And you can say hi to the Jersey girls (that’s the cows!)!

Easy to find, quaint little tasting room, clean. Bathroom available. Dogs met us at the car, which we loved. We petted some cows, very sweet. Washed our hands, met the people serving us — lovely and so knowledgable! — then set about tasting every single cheese they have! They have water and crackers, and notecards and pens so you can make notes as you taste. They have wedges for sale right there and the prices are good. The Farmstead Gouda and Havarti are amazing, but many of their cheeses are just knock-​outs! The service is outstanding. They made us feel so welcome, and not at all rushed. A very fun & tasty experience!

In the middle of our wine tasting adventure, we glimpsed a sign for this dairy and tasting room and turned around to check it out. The tasting room isn’t anything fancy, just a tiny building next to a big pen of cows, but the free samples and cheese facts and the friendly service made for a lovely stop.
Be sure to take some cheese home with you. The prices were reasonable and since you can try everything they have on site, you can make sure you love the cheese before you buy it.
It is a bit off the path, so perhaps give a call before stopping in. There was only one employee on site the day we were in, and I can imagine they may close on some popular travel days.

Husbandry, tasting facility and product observations in that order and based on a visit to the tasting room a few weeks ago.
HUSBANDRY:
They call them «Jersey working girls». The brown and white colored Jersey cows you see grazing in the fields on the drive up to the tasting room. But as we pulled up we also saw black and white cows (Holsteins?) that were being held in a pen, some lying in their own waste causing a passenger in our back seat to say, «I feel sorry for the cows. I couldn’t work at a dairy».
Yet, he (and I) eat cheese. And this is one of the good guy dairies whose cheese we buy at our local market.. A small artisan dairy with a thoughtful compass about animal husbandry and quality product production.
Still, true enough that most of us, like our passenger that day, don’t think of the process all the way through for how cheese is produced. Keeping cows pregnant and taking away the calves after delivery so the milk can be harvested for human use. Sending out the calves to be raised, in the case of the females, to be dairy animals themselves or, in the case of the males, to end up as veal production.
It’s good to think about where our food comes from. Some of us will choose not to eat dairy products as a result. Some of us will choose to still do that. But if we do that mindfully then we’ll also choose to do business with places like Willamette Valley Cheese Company (WVCC) where husbandry standards are high.
Employees take pride that the cows are well tended and pointed out, and we agreed, the lack of odor, even at the holding pen, that is present in mass market dairy farms and the lack of mournful «mooing» here (which can be a distress response in cows) as the cows graze in open field.
They also share that the calves are not sent to feed lots for veal production, but to free range locations where they can grow into full sized cows. Which I can hear my vegetarian friends saying ultimately meet the same end of ending up on a dinner plate. True enough. I don’t eat beef anymore myself. But if I did I would choose free range raised cattle over the suffering of those raised in food lots.
TASTING ROOM:
End of food source ruminations. Now for the tasting room.
A smallish but bright space inside an old house on the dairy property.
Tasting is free and samples are offered of all of the many cheeses made by WVCC.
Six stars to the woman managing the tasting room the day we visited. Folks who want to know how to get this right at any tasting room might just come watch her as she could teach a master class. Every cheese made was freshly cut and offered as samples to the ten or so of us in the tasting room, all the while answering our questions and gathering our feedback and ringing up the sales. She was a great, friendly emissary for the business!
Sadly, tasting here would be inaccessible to most people with mobility limits given the deep gravel parking lot and also that the tasting room has an awkward step up or two into it. (see photos) For advance planning if you need to consider barrier free access for yourself or family member or friend, you will find barriers here. Unfortunate since it would be readily achievable to fix this. But for now it is what it is. And it also is the reason this review is three stars and not four, the entry barriers to the 13% minority population of Americans that are people with mobility disabilities. I have MS myself so I put a high premium on equal access. And, no, a building is not grandfathered in to allow barriers because it was built before 1990 when the ADA was passed. That is where the «readily achievable» thing comes in for barrier removal. Just sayin’.
PRODUCT:
While Willamette Valley Cheese Company is likely best known for their flavored Havarti cheeses, we most enjoyed the aged Fontina they call Brindisi (a first for us at the tasting room since our market doesn’t stock it), the aged Cheddar (white of course as all cheddar is absent food coloring agents which, thankfully, they do not add here) and Brie. We think their Brie is excellent and when purchased in the tasting room it is as fresh as it gets. .

THIS N THAT:
Since I’d seen WVCC ads that said their cheese is from all Jersey cow milk (which tends to be higher in fat and more flavorful for cheese they say), after our visit I emailed the company to ask about the black and white cows in the pen that had the passenger in our back seat feeling sorry for them. They told me that WVCC does raise other breeds of cows to sell milk to other cheese makers. Also they said all their cows are pasture raised but on that day there was work being done in a pasture hence these cows time in the holding pen. Very nice of them to answer my inquiry.

The cheese I tasted at the Portland Farmer’s Market was GREAT.
So enjoy that if you’d like.
But when I bought some, the very nice man gave me a flier that he said allowed entry for two to their cheese tasting room. Written on the flier were the words
«Voucher is good for 2 persons.»
So I looked into this to see what kind of gratitude they were extending to me, and it turns out the tasting room is FREE. I called them, to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, and they said that, no, the voucher isn’t worth anything, and is «just good business.»
So I responded that, while their cheese was lovely and I wished them luck, being lied to is not «good business» in my book, and so I won’t be frequenting their tasting room or their stalls at local markets ever again. That’s one of the problems with Capitalism, though, isn’t it? It encourages good folks to do bad things in the name of profit. I love that they used the words «just» and «good» in their response to me, and am considering sending them a dictionary.

Put this on your list as a «must try».
Great for the whole family, this is a working dairy and cheese factory, that features some sublime cheeses. You can taste them all if you so choose. Better than the wineries, because it costs you nothing. Unless, of course, you buy some to bring home.
Which we did.
Luckily, they are shrink wrapped to keep them fresh and will travel nicely in our little ice chest.
Great experience, fun drive, even got to meet the ladies (i.e. cows) up close and personal, who are the real reason we are all there.

This is the real deal. Jersey cows outside, 3 farm dogs (although they’re after human attention more than cow-​tending) & a wonderful woman cutting me all types of cheeses. 31 flavors although not all were tried… think I got through 20. Bought a small wheel of Brie, wedge of Cumin Havarti & wedge of Herbs de Provance Havarti. Each cheese — from aged to raw milk — was incredible. If I lived here, I’d live on that cheese! Most were available for sale too & very affordable.

The cheese tasting was free, which was a plus.
The cheeses I sampled weren’t that good. I bought a bag of cheese curds and they were especially not good.

FREE cheese tasting! w00t!
The lady was so nice and very generous with the cheese tasting! I’m so glad I stopped by to eat some cheese. ^_​_​^ I say the harvati herb de provence was my favorite! It’s not expensive either!

what a fun place to sample lots (and I mean LOTS) of great cheeses! I walked out with $ 30 worth. It was really fun and everything was amazing!