Spring Flush: The Best Time of Year to Be a Cheese Lover

Every year, right around the spring equinox, something happens in the dairy world that I genuinely look forward to more than most holidays. The days get longer, the grass starts pushing up green, and goats, sheep, and cows — after a long winter — start producing milk again in earnest. In the cheese world, we call it spring flush, and if you're not paying attention to it, you're missing one of the most delicious moments of the entire year.

Spring flush is the seasonal surge in milk production that happens when dairy animals come out of winter. Goats and sheep, which are highly seasonal, give birth in late winter and early spring — and with new kids and lambs at their sides, their milk production kicks into high gear. Cows, too, respond to the change in season: longer days trigger hormonal changes, and as they move onto fresh spring pasture, their milk shifts in character. It becomes richer in certain fatty acids, brighter in flavor, and noticeably more alive.

For cheesemakers, it's basically Christmas morning. After months of working with stored or limited milk, suddenly they have an abundance — and milk of exceptional quality. The spring milk is what drives the production of some of the most iconic, seasonal cheeses in the world.

The flavor of cheese is inseparable from what the animals ate. Winter milk — from hay — produces perfectly great cheese, but it is very different from its Spring counterpart. Animals grazing on fresh pasture- spring grass, wild herbs, clover, dandelion — all of that ends up, in subtle ways, in the milk, and then in the cheese. Scientists call these flavor compounds terroir. I just call it delicious.

There's also something emotionally satisfying about eating seasonally in the cheese world. We do it with vegetables and fruit without a second thought — we wait for tomatoes in August, for apples in October. But with cheese, most of us have been conditioned to think it's available year-round in identical form. It is and it isn't. The best cheesemakers are working with the rhythm of their animals, and the cheeses that result from spring flush are genuinely different — and genuinely worth celebrating.

The spring equinox is March 20th — hooray. My suggestion: build a small spring cheese board. Fresh chèvre. Something with sheep's milk. Radishes, spring peas if you can find them, good honey, maybe some pickled something for acidity. A crisp white wine or a dry rosé.

It's the most delicious way I know to say: winter is over. The animals are happy. The milk is flowing. And we are very, very lucky to be cheese people.