The American Cheese Society just crowned its 2026 Best of Show winner, and if you haven't heard of Jasper Hill Farm's Winnimere, I don't blame you. But you should be mad about it. Because this cheese — a bark-wrapped, soft-ripened beauty from Greensboro, Vermont — is apparently so good that it won the whole damn thing, and also so scarce that you basically have to know a guy who knows a guy.
Let me explain why this matters.
Winnimere is a winter-only cheese. That's not marketing hype — it's a biological constraint. The cows eat hay in winter instead of pasture grass, which changes the milk composition, which means Jasper Hill can only make this cheese from December through March. The wheels get wrapped in strips of spruce bark (yes, actual tree bark) that they harvest from a local forest, then aged for about two months in the farm's legendary affineuring caves. The bark isn't a gimmick — it imparts a subtle woodsiness and helps the rind develop that iconic mushroomy, earthy funk that serious cheese people lose their minds over.
And the American Cheese Society judges lost their minds over it. Winnimere took Best of Show against hundreds of entries from across the continent, marking yet another win for a creamery that has quietly become the single most decorated cheese producer in the United States. Jasper Hill doesn't just make good cheese — they make the kind of cheese that makes European fromagers nervous. Their Bayley Hazen Blue, their Moses Sleeper, their Constant Bliss — each has won major awards. But Winnimere is the crown jewel, a cheese you can only get for a few months a year, and now officially the best cheese in America.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the cheese spectrum, the FDA is having a much less fun week. Over 30,000 pounds of smoked cheddar and white cheddar were just slapped with the agency's highest risk classification after a recall. Listeria, naturally. It's a reminder that for every tiny Vermont creamery wrapping cheese in hand-harvested spruce bark, there's an industrial supply chain pumping out product that — statistically speaking — is way more likely to make you sick. The artisan cheese world is romantic as hell, but it also represents a tiny fraction of what Americans actually eat. Most of us are eating cheese that was designed by food scientists in a lab to cost as little as possible and last as long as possible, and that's a big part of why the FDA has a job at all.
The contrast is almost too perfect. On one side: a wheel of Winnimere, made from the milk of a single herd of cows, aged in a cave, wrapped in bark, produced for maybe four months a year, impossible to find outside of specialty shops, and now objectively the best cheese in the country. On the other side: 30,000 pounds of cheddar so suspect that the FDA had to step in and say "please don't eat this." These two realities coexist in the same country, the same food system, the same grocery store aisles.
I know which one I'm spending my money on. If you can find it — and that's a genuine if — buy a wheel of Winnimere this winter. Wrap yourself in that spruce-bark magic. Eat it on a good cracker with nothing else, because it doesn't need help. And maybe, just maybe, think about why the best food in America is still made by people, not by machines.