He is friendly, engaging and soft-spoken, but there is a little bit of a mad genius in Willi Lehner, who makes cheeses to die for and ages them out by Blue Mounds in an underground fortress he compares to an air-raid bunker.

The other day, the New York Times called Lehner "a local legend, the off-the-grid rock star of the Wisconsin artisanal cheese movement. "

Lehner is a bit sheepish about the rock-star label, but it doesn't take much to get him banging a drum about cheese, especially the complex and unusual varieties he creates with what the Times called "freestyle alchemy."

Take Lehner's Earth Schmier, a cheese he developed after an exhilarating 2005 trip to England, Scotland and Ireland, where, Lehner said, "they are really passionate about their cheesemaking."

Lehner and his partner, Quitas McKnight, visited 16 farmstead cheesemakers, where the cows are milked and the cheese made at the same location. One in particular stuck with Lehner. The cheesemaker insisted Lehner learn to employ the "terroir " in his cheeses, a French term that translates to terrain but holds a deeper meaning for food and wine artisans.

Back from England, Lehner was pulling weeds in his garden when he picked up a handful of soil and had the revelation that this -- the microbes in the soil -- was what the English cheesemaker had been talking about.

Lehner took the soil and put it in a jar with water. He shook it, left it for 24 hours, and then ran the water through a strainer. He next smeared the water on one of his cheeses.

"I did it away from the other cheeses, " Lehner said. "I didn 't know if I might be making something akin to nuclear waste. "

Testing would prove the experiment was healthy to eat. Within a week, there was a growth on the cheese and Lehner was delighted with its intense, mushroom-like flavor.

The Times story said Lehner's Earth Schmier has been "a surprise hit " at the Dane County Farmers ' Market, and that 's where I found Lehner Wednesday, at the first of the smaller, midweek markets held on Martin Luther King Boulevard off the Capitol Square.

Lehner 's Bleu Mont Dairy booth was set up near the bottom of the steps to the City-County Building. He chatted with customers, several of whom said "nice to see you back. " Numerous people asked sophisticated questions about the cheeses, but he was just as gracious to those who asked if he had any cheese curds, which he didn 't. (Lehner said he actually doesn 't mind cheese curds, but said the key is to get them fresh, before they 're refrigerated.)

Now 52, Lehner has cheesemaking in his blood. His father was a cheesemaker in Switzerland, and the family moved to the United States just a few years before Willi was born, settling in Barneveld. Eventually, his dad began a 20-year run as manager of a cheese factory that is now the site of the Grumpy Troll brew pub in Mount Horeb.

Willi was involved early, cleaning and doing odd jobs as a little boy and then eventually assisting the cheesemakers. He got his cheesemaker 's license at 24 but still didn 't necessarily see it as his calling. He spent most of his 20s traveling. With Switzerland, where he had extensive family, as his base, Lehner journeyed to India, China, Tibet and Nepal.

He learned plenty traveling but there is no place better to learn about cheese than Switzerland. Lehner learned the importance of using grass-fed cows for milk and he marveled at the great farmers ' markets throughout Europe.

When he returned to the Madison area, to work for his father, Lehner became a vendor at the Dane County Farmers ' Market. Twenty-five years later, he 's still at it.

Lehner makes his cheese at four carefully selected plants, then brings them home to his farm to age in the underground cave he built by himself, an arduous task he accomplished in a little over a year. The vault is 66 feet long by 24 feet wide and is 12 feet underground. It has allowed Lehner to better control the temperature and humidity and age his cheeses for as long as they need "to develop their full potential. "

One of Lehner 's cheeses, a bandaged cheddar he now ages on spruce boards in his cave, won first prize at the 2006 American Cheese Society judging. Willi brought the last of it to the Grumpy Troll the other night, and sat with brewmaster Mark Duchow, whose Baltic Porter had just won the gold medal at the 2008 World Beer Cup.

The two friends washed the award-winning cheese down with the award-winning beer. It doesn 't get much better than that.

Contact Doug Moe at 608-252-6446 or dmoe@madison.com.