At Pompeano, in the Apennine hills of Serramazzoni above Modena, a cooperative dairy founded in 1964 makes one of the rarest Parmigiano Reggiano in Italy: one wheel a day, from the milk of a white cow that almost disappeared. Santa Rita Bio sits at the end of a closed chain of eight farms which, since 1992, have worked without synthetic fertilizers, pesticides or GMOs, and have been certified that way. Their milk becomes Parmigiano Reggiano at the Ca' Vecchino dairy in nearby Ospitaletto, and the wheels come back to Santa Rita to be aged, selected and sold.
What makes their best wheels unusual is the animal at the start of the chain. The Bianca Modenese, the white cow of Modena, was for generations the breed that pulled the plough, gave meat and made the milk for Parmigiano. In the middle of the twentieth century there were well over a hundred thousand of them. Then came the Friesian, with far higher yields and udders made for milking machines, and the white cows left the stables. By the end of the 1990s about two hundred remained.
In 2005 the Province of Modena and Slow Food launched a project to save the breed, and the Slow Food Presidium for Parmigiano Reggiano from Bianca Modenese milk was born. Since 2009 Santa Rita Bio has made a Parmigiano from the milk of these cows alone. A Bianca Modenese gives about 2.5 to 3 gallons (9 to 12 liters) of milk a day, a fifth of a modern Friesian, and the four farms that raise them keep a little over two hundred animals. The result is a single wheel a day.
The milk is worth the wait. It is rich in a protein variant, kappa-casein B, that cheesemakers prize because it sets into a firmer curd, and a firm curd is what a wheel needs to age for years without losing its structure. In the mouth that means a paste that stays sweet and milky at 24 months, turns amber, spiced and crystalline at 40 and 60 months, and in the 2009 reserve, a wheel made in May 2009, reaches a depth very few cheeses ever see.
For Terra Sacra, Santa Rita Bio is what a supply chain looks like when nobody in it is anonymous: eight farms, one dairy, one valley, and a breed that is still here because a few families decided not to let it go.
