Collection: Ferdy Wild
Raw milk from Original Brown Alpine cows, milked by hand on a summer pasture at 4,760 feet (1,450 m) and turned into cheese over a wood fire, in a stone hut in Val d'Inferno. That is how Ferdy Wild makes Formai de Mut, the protected mountain cheese of the upper Val Brembana. The longer it ages, the more it tastes of hazelnut, alpine grass and smoke. The family farm above Bergamo is listed in the Michelin Guide, and its cheese trolley is famous.
Lombardy
Ferdy Wild began with very little: a plot of land and ten horses. In 1989 Ferdinando Quarteroni and his wife Cinzia set out to bring life back to Lenna, in the Val Brembana above Bergamo, a mountain valley that was emptying out. Today the farm is run with their children, Nicolò and Alice, and Nicolò's wife Nicole. It now has a restaurant, rooms and a shop, and is followed online by hundreds of thousands of people who have never seen a cow milked by hand.
In 2000 the family bought a stone hut in Val d'Inferno, above the village of Ornica, and began making Formai de Mut dell'Alta Valle Brembana PDO on the summer pasture the way it used to be made, following the teachings of grandmother Petronilla. Every summer Ferdy moves up with the herd. The cows are Original Brown Alpine, the old mountain breed, out on pasture at least six months a year. They are milked by hand, and the raw milk is worked straight away in a copper cauldron over a wood fire.
You can taste all of it. The 2025 wheels from the Casera pasture, at 4,760 feet (1,450 m), are soft and elastic, with a light note of wood smoke and the buttery perfume of alpine milk. The 2023 is fuller, floral and long. The 2020, five summers old, is dense and complex, with hazelnut, forest floor and a deep savory finish. As they say in the cellar, a cheese like this does not expire. It matures.
Ferdy also gives a home to the work of his neighbors. From the cellar come the cheese of Alpe Cavizzola, made at 5,900 feet (1,800 m) by Alfio Sassella and Sonia Marioli with a little milk from the Orobic goat, a breed once close to extinction, and the Grasso d'Alpe of Val Gerola, made by Giovanni Figoni in old stone huts. There is aged mascherpa, a salted alpine ricotta with notes of hazelnut and smoke, and the square stracchino named after the tired cows coming down from the pasture. Mountain honey, wild blueberry jam, heirloom cornmeal for polenta and herbal teas of linden, elderflower and yarrow complete the pantry.
For Terra Sacra, Ferdy Wild is the mountain as it should be: animals that graze, cheese made where the grass grows, and a family that decided to stay.