Champion of Fine Cheese Daphne Zepos Dies at 52

Daphne Zepos, internationally recognized authority in the cheese, the experience includes buy it, sell it, which is especially the almost transcendental experience of eating it, died Tuesday at home in San Francisco. He was 52 years.

The cause was lung cancer, her husband, Brad Brown said.

A writer, lecturer, consultant, importer, and the judge of cheese chef competition, Mrs. Zepos was, like the New York Times wrote in 2005 ", one of the most authoritative voices in the field of American cheese." (In this recognition, "American cheese" is not mentioned in American cheese.)

From 2002 to 2005, Ms. Zepos was associated with the center of artisanal cheese, a vast complex of Brennan Terrace restaurant in Manhattan, where the old cheese before being sent to consumers, stores and restaurants.

In 2006, he helped found the Essex Street Cheese Company. Headquartered in New York, imports and wholesalers, a small number of cheeses of Europe.

The main one is Earl, a cousin of French Gruyere, as Mrs. Zepos enthusiastically told the newspaper San Francisco Chronicle in 2006, it triggers "tsunami wave of burning" in the mouth "and let the incredible flavor of the cream and butter in language. "

Ms. Zepos to talk even more poetic. In the description of sensory pleasures of cheese in particular, her husband said Thursday, could have invoked Homer, Mark Rothko, the soul music of Stax / Volt Records, and the pianist Glenn Gould in a single breath happy.

Last year, Mrs. Zepos became owner of the Cheese School of San Francisco, the country's only independent institution of learning dedicated to cheese.

Ms. Zepos work - as well as his writings on the cheese for the website of The Atlantic magazine and elsewhere - has helped lead the current interest in artisanal cheese consumers in the United States.

"Twenty years ago, the image of cheese, as opposed to a very small percentage of Americans who had traveled much, was actually a cheese of the mass market," Ari Weinzweig, founder and CEO of Zingerman, the concern gourmet foods Ann Arbor, Michigan, said on Thursday. "Today, thanks to the leadership of Daphne and education and training, a much larger portion of the American people understand what is the traditional cheese, and it can be."

Ms. Zepos was the anthropologist as an ambassador, for his journeys in search of a good cheese brought to the farms and pastures of small producers throughout Europe and the United States.

The best of his work, used to say, was imbued with the flavor of the mountains and meadows and the life stories of the cheese makers themselves, or so it seemed.

"I wanted people to support small producers of cheese and understand all the work and love that went into it," said Corby Kummer, senior editor of The Atlantic and a writer on food, Thursday . "He said that people can appreciate the full range of aromas and flavors and how to see and feel the cheese -. Literally Toca'l, who cracks, understanding the structure"

In perhaps his most important role, Mrs. Zepos was gerontòleg cheese. More precisely, it was a refiner, as someone who oversees the aging of the cheese its peak exquisite, carefully calibrated known.

The profession that combines the skills of the artist, chemistry and the nanny, is one in which only a few dozen people in the United States can boast.

It was this work that requires Zepos Mrs. Craft, who chairs the center of five caves, "walk-in refrigerators with tightly controlled temperature and humidity there, the cheese in moderation and with exquisite tenderness -. Years old, transformed sometimes it was washed in wine or beer - before it is considered mature enough to use.

Daphne Zepos was born in Athens July 13, 1959, Costa and Greta Zepos. His father was a Greek diplomat, and was raised in Athens, London, Geneva and Brussels. He studied Medieval History at the University of Kent, England, and architecture at the Architectural Association, a trade school in London.

In 1987, his father became the Greek ambassador to the United Nations, and Mrs. Zepos moved with his family in the U.S.

He studied at the New York School Peter Kump Cooking (now the Institute of Culinary Education), and later worked at Campton Place Hotel in San Francisco, where his responsibilities included assembling the basket buy cheeses and push through the lunch room.

Ms. Zepos first time marriage ended in divorce, she married Mr. Brown, an artist in 1994. He survives, along with his parents and a sister, Amalia Zepou.

To travel with Mrs. Zepos on an isolated farm in the mountains, to attend one of their classes or even start a casual conversation state, his colleagues said to be overwhelming in the presence of an evangelist.

"It has never been so indifferent," said Kummer. "He loved what he did. He liked the people who made the cheese. He loved to see the light in your eyes when you put a piece of cheese in his mouth."