Oprah's endorsement a holiday gift to Bay Area cheese company

Inside the giant, funk-smelling aging room, filled to the ceiling with wheels of toma and gouda cheese, Jill Basch scanned her cheese empire and reflected on the latest bit of good fortune to descend on her family business — the Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company.

“Twenty-five years ago, I don’t think I ever dreamed that we could be of the size and have the visibility that we do,” Basch said, “to be on Oprah’s Favorite Things list.”

Apparently, it’s one thing to make award-winning cheeses prized across the country — and another when the queen of media anoints your cheese variety pack as a personal favorite.

“Someone like Oprah with that level of visibility,” Basch said, “it really is a game changer for us.”

Basch has been in the cheese game the last 25 years, since she and her two sisters and father launched the Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company from the family’s dairy farm in Point Reyes in West Marin County.

Earlier in life, Basch and her sisters Lynn Giacomini Stray and Diana Giacomini Hagan had little interest in cows or farm life. But they eventually returned to the farm to help their father fulfill a dream of turning the farm’s milk into cheese. They launched the company with a blue cheese which they peddled at farmers markets around the Bay Area.

“We all worked the farmers markets,” Basch said. “Sometimes with babies in tow.”

The company added toma, brie and gouda to the roster and spread their cheesy products to new markets outside the Bay Area. They outgrew the dairy and added a second factory in Petaluma, now with a hundred employees between both locations.

Then last year came a boon to holiday business when Oprah added the company’s variety box to her prestigious list of favorite things through her publication Oprah Daily. It gave a big jolt to the cheese biz — which Basch said accounted for fifteen percent of direct-to-consumer sales last Christmas season.

This year, the company once again wooed Oprah’s team to make the list once again - this time working with an Italian truffle supplier to create a truffle brie — a reportedly favorite ingredient of Oprah’s. They made the list a second year in a row.

“We’re gaining all sorts of new customers through her publication and the awareness that it brings to be on that list,” Basch said, “and the credibility it brings us.”

Inside a warehouse at the Petaluma factory, workers were hurriedly packing stacks of boxes and getting them ready for shipping. Basch opened a box containing the gift collection, the kind Oprah liked, filled with cheese, spreads and prosciutto ready to ship out. Production manager Kuba Hammerling said the company was ready to meet all the demand brought on by Oprah’s endorsement.

“We have not run out yet,” Hammerling laughed. “And we are far from it.”

Basch said the woman-owned business never rests on its laurels, including a new brie that’s wrapped in bay laurel. She said the company is always experimentation with new cheeses with a constant drive to raise the bar higher — especially if it grabs the attention of Ms. Winfrey.

“We’ve always been very hands on and that’s certainly something that was modeled to us by our parents,” Basch said, “growing up on the working dairy.”