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The drive is tense, but beautiful. Having spent two weeks bombing around Puglia in a small, devilish Fiat that refuses to do my bidding, we have spent the last three days eating nothing but terrali having inadvertently stumbled upon, seemingly, the only food desert in the heel of Italy. We are hungry and feel the elation of the early part of our trip in danger of slipping out of our hands. A budget flight back home to London the final insult.
And then we arrive in pretty Altamura, a hilltop town in the west of the region close to the border with Basilicata, passing through rich agricultural lands in various shades of yellow and green, in search of cheese: mood-elevating, life-affirming, vacation-saving cheese. For Altamura is the home of the Diceccas, some of the best cheesemakers in Italy.
Amore Primitivo
The first thing that hits you when you walk into Caseificcio Dicecca is the noise, even before the smell. It’s a family business and the five siblings that run it now are fourth generation. There’s Maristella (top) and Vittoria, the sisters who work the sales, and the cheesemaking brothers Paolo, Angelo, and finally Vito. He’s the person I’ve been Whatsapping throughout our trip. The siblings are slinging cheese into bags for the locals, shouting and gesticulating at each other – it’s difficult to discern gentle joshing from genuine anger, Southern Italian theatricality as confusing as ever for the reserved outsider – their voices bouncing off the walls of the small shop interior.
The counter contents are not uniformly the kind you’d expect to find in Puglia. Sure, there is plenty of burrata and mozzarella and caciocavallo, but you’ll find blue cheeses too, cheeses penetrated, coated and sprinkled with ingredients from the Dicecca brothers’ travels, like coffee from Colombia or whiskey from Japan. They also take inspiration from closer to home: one blue cheese, called Amore Primitivo, is aged in local Primitivo wine, another in balsamic vinegar from Modena. Vito is the one driving innovation.
“When I said to my brothers and sisters 10 years ago that I wanted to do blue cheese in Puglia they looked at me as if I was crazy,” he says. “But why can’t I make new cheeses that aren’t traditional in Puglia? Selling a burrata in Milan – it’s too easy. I want to sell a blue cheese in Milan, a blue cheese in France. That’s my goal.”
Vito Dicecca
Out back in the lab is where the magic happens. Sadly, when we arrive late and slightly flustered we’ve already missed the cheesemaking for the day, which starts at around 4.30 in the morning, when one of the brothers will head off to pick up the milk from a local farm, and will last until 11, 12. “Next time bro,” says Vito. The space is gleaming steel and still humming warm from the morning’s activity.
All in all the brothers make around 300 cheeses, and have been doing it since they were 14 or 15, with Vito especially not being too keen on school. They travelled the world separately in their late teens and early 20s (they are dancing around 40 now), finding a way to make cheese wherever they went before returning to take on the family business. It’s hard work seven days a week, but it’s a love affair – Vito even proposed to his girlfriend with a heart-shaped Amore Primitivo, minus a ring.
“I never give her any kind of jewellery, I just bring cheese. When my family celebrates birthdays, I bring cheese. I don’t bring anything else,” says the man whose Instagram handle is @cheeseinside. But the early mornings take it out of him, he concedes, so has he ever considered slowing down? No, he says. “My father passed away two years ago and I realised how much he sacrificed. I cannot let it go”.
Part of continuing the legacy and success of the Dicecca name is introducing cheese-obsessed tourists like us to the family’s work. Contact Vito on social media and you can join a tour of the caseificio (‘cheese factory’) before heading to legendary local bakery Di Gesù to pick up focaccia, over which Vito will theatrically split a burrata as Instagram boomerangs are perfected. He’s had visitors from all over the world drop in for the cheese experience.
He’s also planning to launch a more in-depth, all-inclusive food experience, where you can stay in a family house in the nearby Mercadanti forest (where he has also just opened a cheese bar – heavenly, right?) with Vito as your personal guide to the best of the food scene in this part of Puglia – octopus in Bari, his cheese, the near perfect local bread, those kinds of things. It’s also where his goats live. “I just bought 200, I love the milk,” he says. “I do a yogurt and a couple of cheeses like camembert and brie. I’ve become a fan of goats”.
Paolo and Vito in the lab
Whoever heard of a Puglian cheesemaker with a fondness for making goat’s milk French cheeses, or, as he claims, to be heavily influenced by classic blue cheeses of England like Stilton and Shropshire Blue? There is a desire in Vito to show the world that Puglia is so much more than just burrata, now surely one of the world’s favourite cheeses. But the burrata is superb: the stracciatella and cream falls out like lactic rain after a drought when Vito tears at it with his hands, while it tastes as fresh and of the terroir as any I’ve had.
“We can put everything inside the burrata,” he says, and they have, from mango to caviar, “but the simple burrata is still the best for my taste. The secret is fresh cream that you make yourself.”
There’s also a desire too to get back at the bullies who picked on him at school for his family’s craft. His classmates would make sheep noises at him he says, in the not quite formed reasoning of children.
Above all, there’s family: the opportunity to work with your siblings day in, day out to create something that can last for another four generations at least. “My father always wanted us together,” he says poignantly, “because love is the most important thing.”
It's love that you can taste in the cheeses of Caseificio Dicecca: love for family, home and of course, really, really good cheese.
