Meet Michele Buster of Forever Cheese, Importer of Mediterranean Cheeses

If you’ve ever enjoyed Drunken Goat cheese or snacked on Mitica Marcona almonds, you have Michele Buster and Forever Cheese to thank.

Over the past two decades, Michele Buster has been instrumental in shaping the emergence of Mediterranean cheese and cheese accompaniment products in the American marketplace. She first lived in Valencia, Spain, as a student and then her first career, in the sports industry, brought her back to Spain and Italy in the early ’90s, where she met her now-business partner Pierluigi Sini.

Sini’s family had been making Pecorino Romano cheese in the Roman countryside for generations. The two moved to New York and started a company to import Pierluigi’s family’s cheese. Soon, they expanded to Spanish cheeses, taking advantage of Michele’s time spent there, and kept growing from there. Today, they import cheeses and specialty products from Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Croatia, with a particular focus on sheep and goat milk cheeses.

Michele is a member of the prestigious International Guilde des Fromagers, the PDO Sao Jorge Consortium in Portugal inducted her as an honorary member, and she was also recognized with an award from Murcia, Spain, for being the person who most stimulated the agronomy of the region. In 2019, on behalf of Forever Cheese, she accepted a Whole Foods Market Global Supplier Award for Raising the Bar for Quality.

We chatted with Michele about how she helped popularize Pecorino Romano, why she loves sheep and goat’s milk cheeses, and how she convinced a small Croatian cheesemaker to let her sell their cheese to Americans.

How did you build Fulvi Pecorino Romano into the well-known brand it is today?

Fulvi Pecorino Romano was one of the last remaining Pecorino Romano cheeses from the countryside of Rome. Pecorino Romano used to only be made in the countryside of Rome, but in the 1950s, the president of Italy was from Sardinia, and he changed that ruling to say you could make Pecorino in the countryside of Rome or in Sardinia. Later, they created Pecorino Romano de Lazio, which is another distinction, because producers in Rome couldn’t compete with the co-ops in Sardinia that produced cheese at a lower cost. Our cheese costs more because we produce in the countryside of Rome, and we age the cheese twice as long as what the DOP says.

It was hard also because Locatelli was always a big brand everywhere and some people thought Fulvi was a type of Locatelli, because people thought Locatelli was the type of cheese. And they were very confused as to what Pecorino Romano was. Some people didn’t even know it was made from sheep’s milk. It was very hard to build a brand around this family’s cheese that was so different: not as salty, not as dry, and not as hard, and it didn’t disappear in food when you grated it. It was really a labor of love. I had to get out there and promote it, I was literally always on the road, doing demos, and talking about the product.

How did you find the producers of Drunken Goat in Murcia?

Drunken Goat photo credit Forever Cheese

One of the deals I made with Pierluigi when we started the company was, I told him, I love your family’s cheese and I really want to help you with your goal to place them in the best shops and restaurants in the U.S. However, if we’re successful with your family, you need to let me go to Spain and find a really great Manchego because I need to show the American public what Manchego really tastes like.

And when I finally started looking, it was really hard to find one that I was excited about, it took me almost two years. And that’s when I found Drunken Goat. It wasn’t Drunken Goat then, it was queso de cabra al vino, which is a mouthful and no one could say it. Every distributor that we worked with gave it a different name, which is why I had to come up with some way to make people remember it. I came up with the name Drunken Goat when I was on the Stairmaster.

When I found them, there was no DOP yet. It was just a couple of people soaking their cheese in wine, because the region had a really hard time marketing their milk. They had hired a consultant to come up with a cheese that would help them sell their milk, and this is what they came up with.

And how did Paški Sir from Croatia happen, how did you convince them to let you sell their cheese?

Paški Sir photo courtesy of Forever Cheese

By the year 1999 we were importing cheeses and other products from Italy Spain and Portugal.

For once I decided to go on vacation to Croatia since I had wanted to go for years and this had nothing to do with cheese, funny enough a friend wanted to introduce me to the famous cheese from Pag island, And not only did I fall in love first and foremost but the Adriatic sea but then I fell in love with Paški Sir.

But it wasn’t so easy. Not everybody has their heart set on selling outside their country. Paški Sir was a cheese that they would run out of every year. Sheep produce only a half-liter of milk a day, and they only produce six months out of the year. With limited quantity, they really didn’t have a need to sell outside their island. I tried to get help from the Chamber of Commerce, I actually tried to call the restaurant where I ate the cheese, and people thought I was crazy, they didn’t want to do it. And then I realized that some of the cheesemakers spoke Italian because they are so close to Italy. And that was my in, I spoke Italian.

I narrowed it down to this company on the island of Pag, where I got some samples from. Then I placed an order with them, but they never shipped it because they were still scared. I finally had to get a friend of a friend, a Croatian, and he drove back down with me, sat in front of them and said he’d babysit us, said he’d be there in the middle. And for the first year, he was involved, to make them feel better that there was a Croatian involved. And since then, they run around, super proud that they have an American partner. And I’m really proud to work with them. We are the voices of our producers.

Why didn’t you ever go after French cheeses, say, or Dutch cheeses?

Well when we started it was all about Pierluigi’s family. And then it was about Spain because of my love for Spain. It’s always been about what we love. We didn’t want to do France because when we started, everybody was doing France. Why would we do what everyone else is doing, let’s just focus on who we are.

What kind of cheese do you love to eat?

It depends on what I’m in the mood for but I’m always in the mood for sheep’s milk cheese. I love sheep’s milk cheese. It was my first love. I loved Manchego when I was living in Valencia and then I met Pierluigi and his family’s cheese was all sheep milk. I love sheep, anytime of day. And I love this one-year aged sheep cheese made by a producer in Rioja called Oveja Añejo that has a smokiness to it.

But I also love all my goat cheese. I didn’t like goat cheese when I started. I was scared of goat because I had only had goat logs, and one very bad one. When I had this rich milk from the Murciana goat, it opened my eyes. Having all these other aged kinds, that weren’t the white stuff, helped me find ones like the Smokin’ Goat that I do now from the Canary Islands and La Dama Sagrada, which is a raw goat’s milk cheese from La Mancha, and PataCabra, which is a washed-curd goat from Aragón in a brick shape. I love all of these and all of these, except Smokin’, are Murciana goat.

Are there any cheeses you don’t like?

Blu di Bufala photo courtesy of Forever Cheese

I like my cheeses to be flavorful, but I don’t like bitter, I don’t like too tangy. And I’m still getting over the hump of blue cheeses. So the first blue that I almost like is the Blu di Bufala, which is the first buffalo cheese that I found from the Gritti family. It has that milkiness, that creaminess that I love from cheese that offsets the piquancy of the blue veins.

Do you think American palates have opened up to lesser known cheeses in recent years?

Well, it depends on where you are in the country, it’s not the same across the board. But cheese has grown as a category over the past years, and people want to eat better cheeses, they want to try different things. There’s a lot of curiosity, that is, up until the pandemic. You know, the pandemic really threw a cog in everything, because people went back to the basics. But I always recommend the Drunken Goat as a starter goat cheese, because it has that creaminess, it’s mild, and it has that little wine in the finish.