How The Cheese Lady Rachael Lucas Has Crafted a Career in Cheese & Wine

Rachel Lucas, photo courtesy of Rachael Lucas

“I feel like I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to do,” says Rachael Lucas, a cheese and wine specialist who calls herself The Cheese Lady. “It’s taken a long time. I’m 45 years old, a total late bloomer, but I just had no idea. I had no direction until cheese.”

Since January 2022, Lucas, based near Woodinville, WA, wine country, has been carving out a niche, supplying area wineries with high-quality cheese for their cheese plates, clubs, cases, and pairings for their releases. She also hosts guided, educational tasting events and classes and raclette pop-ups, runs a themed cheese club called Freak the Funk, crafts custom cheese platters, charcuterie platters, and grazing tables, and offers consulting services to businesses that want to incorporate a cheese program into their operations. She is the resident cheese monger at Damsel Cellars and pours weekly there.

Crafting A Career in Cheese

Lucas is a Certified Cheese Professional (CCP), a Certified Cheese Sensory Evaluator (CCSE), designations earned from the American Cheese Society, a Certified Specialist of Wine (CSW), awarded by the Society of Wine Educators, and is studying for its certified wine educator exam. She has passed the Wine & Spirit Education Trust’s Level 3 exam and plans to become credentialed as a Master of Wine. Learn how to become a Certified Cheese Professional.

Raised in Kansas in a meat and potatoes family that ate mostly what her father hunted, Lucas didn’t have much access to good cheese. She ate mostly processed products, and her interest in cheese was ignited when her father put a slice of blue cheese on gamey meat. “I just loved it,” she says. “I knew I liked cheese, whatever I was able to get.”

She did not envision a culinary career. After graduating from the University of Kansas with a degree in English, Lucas taught English and Spanish in Kansas and Costa Rica and hated it. She’d always loved food, so she started working in restaurants, making enough money to get by, having a lot of fun, but feeling aimless.

In her mid-30s, Lucas moved to Seattle, WA, where she discovered the cheese department in Metropolitan Market West Seattle and its petite fromage basket. “I would dig through there every single day and grab two or three cheeses, take them home, do research, and taste new things,” she recounts. Serendipitously, a week after confiding to her then-boyfriend that she wished she could work there, during her regular jaunt through the basket, the manager suggested just that.

Lucas says she gets chills whenever she tells the story. “My very first day on the job it clicked, and I thought. ‘This is it’. This is what I’m supposed to do with my life,” she says. I’ve been running with it ever since. It’s been about 11 years now.” And now at Damsel, in a move that mirrors her discovery of the petite fromage basket, she has a “Baby Cheesus basket: that has little $3 wedges patrons can eat in the tasting room if they don’t want the featured cheese plates.

Lucas eventually became a grocery store cheese buyer. “We don’t have a lot of cheese shops, which is weird because there’s so much good food in Seattle,” she says. “You find a lot of overly qualified cheese specialists working in grocery stores because we’re not going to not work with cheese.” Armed with her CCP and CCSE appellations, she was ready to move on from grocery stores and tackle a new project when Covid hit.

Photo by Marek Mucha on Unsplash

Cheese Meets Wine

Lucas decided to learn all about wine. She spent the next two years studying and earning designations and began working at Damsel. When the world opened back up, serendipity struck again. A mentor in the cheese business moved to New Zealand, giving her a few accounts, including a local restaurant’s monthly cheese club. Lucas, who was required to obtain a business license, had no idea what she was going to do with it.

She wound up starting a cheese program at Damsel. Her focus on sourcing cheeses not available at grocery stores, small batch cheeses made by producers who prioritize sustainability and practice humane animal husbandry, impressed the winemakers and tasting room managers who visited the winery. “They wanted cheese programs, too. “It snowballed,” says Lucas.

Lucas also installs countertop fridges at wineries that don’t have kitchens or cheese programs, stocking them with cheeses leftover from events and classes and accompaniments like olives or charcuterie, ensuring that the cheeses pair with at least one of the wines, so customers can buy fresh wedges when purchasing a bottle. “I’ve got those popping up all over the place,” says Lucas. “Everywhere I go, people are like, ‘Hey, you’re the cheese lady!’”

Cheese at Damsel Cellars

Each week, she, tasting room managers, winemakers, and winery staff taste the cheeses with the wine to determine the best pairings for flights. Lucas rotates selections, so she and customers don’t get bored, and recommends cheeses that emphasize the notes in the wines, so they sing. At Damsel the cheeses rotate monthly with three cheeses that go on the cheese plates. Shares Lucas, “This quarter it’s Black Sheep Creamery’s Fresh sheep cheese with a tickle of vanilla and honey—perfect for our Pinot Gris—, Cornish Kern, and Boxcarr Handmade Cheese’s Cottonbell. We also have Colston Bassett Stilton, Garroxta, Chaumes, a triple crème of some sort at all times, a local cheese called Nice Ash, Cabot Clothbound Cheddar, Tomme de Savoie, and Shooting Star Creamery’s Aries.” Read more about Boxcarr Handmade Cheese, Colston Bassett Stilton and Shooting Star Creamery.

How Lucas Approaches Tasting

Photo by Alexandra Marta on Unsplash

To Lucas, tasting is an encompassing sensorial experience, similar to ASMR, an autonomous sensory meridian response, a term used to describe a tingling, static-like, or goosebumps sensation in response to specific triggering audio or visual stimuli, according to the University of Nebraska Medical Center. In fact, a line on her website reads, “Organoleptics, Hell Yeah!”

“It’s like experiencing being completely present,” she describes, “in the moment, and experiencing what you’re ingesting to its fullest extent.” She teaches people to see and visually experience the cheese first, and then touch, smell, and feel it. When she has people put the cheese in their mouths, she says that’s when it gets ugly.

Her method - “This is the best way to glean as many nuances as possible,” she explains – has tasters put the cheese behind their top front teeth, gum it up, and then start moving the cheese around to cover the entire palate with their tongue without swallowing. “I show them, and they usually laugh because it looks weird,” says Lucas. Next is a sip of wine, which brings in some air to the mouth. The goal is to get the cheese and wine into the retro nasal passage at the exact same time.

“You still haven’t swallowed the cheese,” says Lucas. “Now you’ve got the wine in your mouth, and you put it all over your palate, swish it around. Then you swallow them at the same time and then exhale out of your nose because the most aromatics that you glean are in the retro nasal passage where the sinuses meet the throat. It’s super eye-opening for people. They’re like, ‘Wow, I didn’t even realize you could taste that much!’”

Lucas loves the textural and aromatic evolution that occurs on the palate during a tasting. Once she tried a Sardinian Pecorino, which has a substantial chew to it, with a Sardinian table wine. “The wine turned it into dust on the palate. You didn’t even have to chew it. It’s exciting. People always leave satisfied and euphoric. And it’s fun.”

She welcomes the opportunity to experience adverse pairings. “I usually leave a tasting with this upset stomach,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll vomit, but I need the education.”

Lucas also enjoys pairing cheese with beer, saying it’s easier than pairing with wine because the two are more similar. The tannins and the high alcohol content, which make the structure in the wine, can make pairing difficult.

Looking ahead, Lucas hopes to open a cheese shop or truck that will include wine. “I live in Washington, and let’s face it, I’m boobs deep in Washington wine right now,” she says. “But I love cheese more than I love wine.”

She’s “flabbergasted” by her success because she had no business plan. “It’s just been so organic,” Lucas says. “Just being obsessed and enthusiastic and passionate about cheese.”