MANCHEGO CHEESE

The name “manchego cheese” refers to the cheese made in the La Mancha region of Spain using milk from manchega ewes and aged for at least sixty days.  Manchego cheese is made from pasteurized milk, or unpasteurized milk if the cheese is hand-made, from ewes raised by registered Denomination of Origin farms.

Manchego cheese is the product of a harsh, extreme climate that favours the growth of very tough plants, the diet for a curious ancestral race of sheep, the manchega, that is raised under very strict standards of breeding and health.  The result is a cheese unlike any other.  Although there are records of people trying to make manchego cheese elsewhere both inside and outside Spain, nobody has ever successfully imitated so many time-worn factors at the same time beyond the borders of La Mancha.

A Cheese with over 2000 Years of History Behind Its

The earliest information we have on manchego cheese is that it was made and eaten many centuries before Jesus Christ.  Although we don’t know what methods our ancestors used to make this natural product, we can safely assume that their cheese tasted very much like ours, and that their cheesemaking methods were most probably similiar to ours.
Archeological remains show that in the Bronze Age, in what is now known as the La Mancha region, the inhabitants used to make a sheep’s milk cheese with the milk of a race of sheep that we might consider the ancestors of our modern manchega sheep.  This race survived the passage of centuries roaming the lands with which it shares its name.
	La Mancha was named by the Arabs, who called it Al Mansha, or “waterless land,” a perfect description of this harsh, rocky region of Spain.  The dry, extreme climate has made La Mancha special and taught its vegetation to withstand the torrid heat of the summer months and the devastating frosts of the La Mancha winter.
This is where we find the plants (mainly grains and legumes) that form the diet of the manchega sheep, a breed that has been adapted to this ecosystem for ages untold.

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