As California's artisan cheese movement stumbles, a cheesemaker is keeping a legacy alive
Cheesemaker Omer Seltzer, left, and farm owner Jennifer Bice with young goats at Redwood Hill Farm in Sebastopol. Seltzer is now making cheese with Bice's legendary dairy. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
In late 2023, Jennifer Bice visited Omer Seltzer, a new Bay Area artisan cheesemaker, at his stand at the Sebastopol farmers' market. A recent transplant to Sonoma County, Seltzer had requested the meeting because he needed a steady supply of milk and Bice had prize-winning goats.
Seltzer's request came at an opportune moment. Bice, now 78, had sold the creamery from her family's nationally known cheese company, Redwood Hill Farm & Creamery, to a Swiss dairy cooperative eight years earlier. She retained ownership of the farm and its herd of 300 goats, who come from a line of animals that regularly won awards at national livestock shows and helped turn the company into an acclaimed brand. The farm still provided milk to the creamery, but she was looking to downsize, so she could have more free time. Working with a smaller producer like Seltzer would be ideal.
Bice tasted Seltzer's products, which ranged from fresh chevre to weeks-old bloomy rind cheeses to hard aged ones. They were all "outstanding and delicious," she said. "A lot of people can make one type really well. But his variety and competence in making all the different methods was impressive to me."
Bice was so convinced that within months, her farm was exclusively selling its legendary milk to Seltzer, 44, who runs his cheese company, Mt. Eitan, with his wife, Tal. "To be able to sell the milk to someone like Omer and Tal, (who) turn it into fabulous cheese, it's something that we can be really proud of," Bice said as baby goats frolicked at her feet.
A variety of Mt. Eitan cheeses, which are now sold at more locations in the Bay Area. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
It's a difficult time for California's artisan cheese industry, the birthplace of multiple prominent, women-led, companies, including Laura Chenel Chevre, Cypress Grove and Cowgirl Creamery, which all played essential roles in the farm-to-table movement from the 1970s to the 2000s. Many, such as Redwood Hill, have been sold off over the past 20 years as their owners reached retirement age. Slowing sales during the pandemic and rising costs have taken a toll on others, with Central Coast Creamery in Paso Robles and Alemar in Sebastopol closing in the past year.
That makes Mt. Eitan's entrance on the local scene a welcome sign for the industry, said Janet Fletcher, author of the newsletter Planet Cheese and a former staff writer and cheese columnist for the Chronicle. She calls Mt. Eitan's Ady, a delicate brined, feta-style cheese, "arguably the best feta we're making in this country," moist and creamy with the right amount of salt and tang.
The Seltzers launched the company in 2023 in Bodega, in the middle of Sonoma County's dairy region, naming it after the site in Israel where Seltzer grew up on his family's goat farm. (Their four daughters, ages 5 to 13, now help out in the dairy.) After securing a steady supply of milk from Redwood Hill Farm in 2024, the Seltzers began working with a distributor that made their cheeses available beyond markets in Sonoma County for the first time, such as at the Marin Farmers' Market and Rainbow Grocery and Loveski Deli in San Francisco. Recently, their cheeses appeared on the carts of three-Michelin-starred restaurants Quince in San Francisco and SingleThread in Healdsburg.
Bodega is so foggy that Seltzer constantly moves his cheeses in and out of the aging and drying rooms depending on their moisture needs, which he calls a prime example of terroir. He personally transports the milk from the farm to his creamery twice a week in his tanker in order to use milk that is no more than two days old.
Mt. Eitan Cheese produced by artisan cheesemaker Omer Seltzer at Redwood Hill Farm in Sebastopol, Calif., Friday, March 17, 2026. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
"Omer is very picky about that," Bice said. By law, he could wait until day three. But, "every day you lose so much in flavor," she said. "Well, you lose the good flavor and then you get the goaty flavors," referring to musky or funky qualities that some goat milk can take on.
Seltzer said the milk from Bice's farm is mild, rich and consistent. "And it has a lot of flavor," he said.
During a recent farm visit by this reporter, Seltzer brought out samples of his goat cheeses that captured that freshness, without a hint of barnyard aroma, in different stages: Tamar, a smooth and tangy fresh chevre; Moni, a two-week-old bloomy rind cheese, milky and somewhat crumbly; and Tome, an Alpine-style cheese about a year old that had begun to develop nutty and sweet flavors.
"They make some really beautiful, unique cheeses that I haven't really seen before in the California cheese landscape," said Alyssa Gilbert, who carries Mt. Eitan cheeses at Ollie's American Cheese + Provisions in Oakland and is also the executive director of the nonprofit California Artisan Cheese Guild, which Bice cofounded in 2007. When Gilbert orders one of the two-week-old cheeses, it takes at least that long to get them because they're made fresh, she said.
Young goats at Redwood Hill Farm, which now provides all of its milk to Mt. Eitan. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
Fletcher said part of what makes Mt. Eitan's Ady special is that domestic feta is hard to find because there's little access to sheep's milk, which provides the fat that makes it creamy. But the Ady retails for around $25 per pound and has to compete with imports like Greek feta available at Trader Joe's "at a ridiculously low price," she said. "He's going to have to rely on people's willingness to pay more for a local product made by hand on a small scale."
Though Seltzer and Bice are from different generations and countries, their families both started goat farms during the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Bice's parents founded Redwood Hill Farm in 1964, then started a goat dairy four years later to meet the demand of local health food stores for raw goat milk. Bice took over operations in 1978 at age 23, running it with her husband, Steven Schack, until his death in 1999. In 2004, Bice began producing cheese, yogurt and kefir that were eventually sold across the country.
Seltzer's parents founded their farm in Israel's Judean Mountains National Forest in 1973, where his mother, an American veterinarian, handled animal husbandry while his father made the cheese. As a young adult, he worked at the farm, apprenticed during the off seasons at goat dairies in Provence and went on to study cheesemaking in an acclaimed dairy science program at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
After Seltzer's father died in Israel, the national park did not renew the family's 50-year lease and they needed a new start. He and Tal took their daughters on a trip around the West Coast to see different dairy regions. Given Marin and Sonoma's rich cheese-making traditions, "it made perfect sense to stay and try to build a creamery here," he said.
A garden near the entrance at Redwood Hill Farm in Sebastopol. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
The arrangement is working for Bice. The farm has reduced the number of its milking goats from 225 to 70, and gets most of its income from selling its prized baby goats - and goat semen - to farms around the world. She doubts she will ever fully retire as long as she lives on the farm, where her younger brother, Scott, is the manager. But she has more free time and plans to take a three-week vacation to Lithuania this month, where she already has plans to visit a cheese store.
Despite the challenges that artisan cheesemakers face in California, Seltzer said he is determined and encouraged by the community he has found in Sonoma County.
"We're in it for the long run," he said.
