Celebrate a shared love of cheese, featuring award-winning, farmstead, artisan and specialty cheeses from the Northwest and beyond! In this annual event that runs through Sept. 28 at all six neighborhood Metropolitan Market locations, guests get a chance to savor unique cheese pairings such as chocolate, sea salt, beer, Boat Street Pickles, salami and more. Part of the fun is the rare face-to-face interaction with cheese-makers, chefs, local artisans, cheese authors and experts.

At each Metropolitan Market location, including Kirkland, there will be 15-20 cheese beyond the cheese makers sampling customers, including Metropolitan Market’s own famous fresh, hand-stretched Mozzarella demonstrations and tastings. Featured cheese-makers include:

Estrella Family Creamery

Worldwide cheese awards too numerous to mention have been bestowed upon Montesano, Wash. based Estrella Family Creamery ever since it first started entering competitions! The farm creates more than 18 different types of cheese, with seasonal variations. All Estrella Family Creamery cheeses are made with raw milk from animals grazed in its organically maintained pastures. Metropolitan Market will feature Estrella’s new Brewleggio during For the Love of Cheese, a “Tallegio” recipe using raw cow’s milk cheese aged 60 days and washed in The Pike Brewery ale.

Gothberg Farms

Metropolitan Market is proud to be the exclusive grocery retailer for Gothberg Farms’ blissful chevre and feta cheeses. This Bow, Wash.-based farm (located on Samish Bay between Seattle and Bellingham) is where Rhonda Gothberg and her family live and produce her premium goat cheeses. In 2001, she and her husband, Roy, made their dream from 40 acres of farmland, a charming, old farmhouse and they built a barn for Rhonda’s cheese-making. Her 22 purebred, registered Lamancha goats make the cheeses especially delicious.

Mt. Townsend Creamery

Metropolitan Market is proud to have been the first to market Mt. Townsend Creamery’s Fromage Blanc and Fromage Blanc with Truffle, which customers happily devour. As the North Olympic Peninsula’s first artisan creamery, owners Matt Day and Ryan Trail have worked to reinvigorate the dairy processing industry in the Northwest by introducing specialty cheeses made using traditional methods with a Northwest flavor. Metropolitan Market also proudly carries the creamery’s new seven-ounce cheeses: Truffle, Red Alder Toma, and Off Kilter—made with The Pike Brewery’s Kilt Lifter Ale.

Black Sheep Creamery

Fine, hand crafted sheep’s milk cheese hails from Brad and Meg Gregory, who own and milk roughly 70 ewes on their farm in Western Washington. Their mostly pasture-grazed mix of milking ewes include East Freisian, Rideau-Arcott, and Lacuane breeds for the creamiest, purest product. Metropolitan Market cheese expert Paige Lamb notes the couple recently returned from Germany and the Basque region in France and Spain, where they had a great opportunity to meet with and draw inspiration from cheese-makers producing Sheep’s milk cheeses.

American Cheese Society 2010 “best in show” cheeses

Metropolitan Market is the only retailer to feature all three Best of Show award winners from the 2010 American Cheese Society competition held just last month: Uplands Cheese Company’s sole cheese – Pleasant Ridge Reserve, made in the style of French Alps (Dodgeville, Wisc.); Vermont Butter & Cheese Creamery (Websterville, VT), for its hand-ladled, ash-ripened goat’s milk cheese, Bonne Bouche; and Farms for City Kids Foundation (Reading, VT) – an educational organization with hands-on farming and cheese-making experiences for urban youth for its Spring Brook Farm Tarentaise, a raw milk, washed rind cheese inspired by traditional cheeses of the French Alps.

For the full schedule, visit www.metropolitan-market.com.