“I’ve been a self-sustaining artist most of my adult life,” said 64-year-old Victor Chiarizia, whose hand-crafted residence is situated on six-plus acres in an Appalachian Mountains’ “holler,” just 12 miles from downtown Asheville, N.C.
A step inside his expansive workshop, which he also built, attests to his artistry. Dozens of tall, graceful glass vases in myriad muted hues line shelves and window ledges, and massive equipment for his ongoing glass blowing endeavor takes up about a quarter of the 3,600-square-foot workshop. Yet increasingly, Chiarizia’s focus has been on cheesemaking.
His late father, a 1940s immigrant from the Italian province of Molise, planted the cheesemaking seed when Chiarizia was just a boy. “It sparked an interest then,” he said, “but it wasn’t until I went to Italy with my family about 13 years ago and tried so many different kinds of cheeses that I realized I could make cow’s milk cheese like my father did. I wanted to make it the old way, the traditional way, the pure way—with mostly raw milk.”
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