Ignazio "Ig" Vella has lived a rewarding life. His family's work in Southern Oregon is being carried on by dedicated foot soldiers and he has settled into an elder statesman role. At 76, he has his health, is surrounded by his family and remains immersed in a business he has known and loved since childhood: the making of fine cheese.

So why is he so irritable? Perhaps it's because the master cheese maker for The Rogue Creamery in Central Point — whose blue cheeses have collected medals around the world for their distinctive flavors — has no patience for shortcuts.

Inside Rogue's blue cheese production room, he observes employees cutting the curd and stirring the whey. He reaches his hand in to squeeze the nascent cheese between his sturdy fingers. Then, stepping outside, Vella turns on his companion, Rogue co-owner David Gremmels, with unexpected intensity.

"He turned on the agitators too god-damned quick!" he growls, jabbing a thumb back over his shoulder at the worker in the room behind them. "The curd didn't bleed long enough. What's the hurry?"

Gremmels nods with a patient smile. "I noticed, too," he says. "Cary and I will talk to him about that."

For Gremmels, who with partner Cary Bryant purchased Rogue Creamery from the Vella family in 2002, this is exactly the kind of feedback he looks for from Vella. Part of the sale agreement — sealed with a handshake — was that Gremmels and Bryant would carry on the creamery's tradition under the guidance of Vella, who would take time away from his family's remaining cheese operation in Sonoma to teach them everything he's absorbed about his art.

It's not easy. It isn't something that can be captured in a book or delivered in a lecture. Vella knows just by hefting it in his hand if a cheese wheel has reached its prime. He can gauge the temperature of an aging cave by walking in and sniffing the air. And exactly what he gleans from pressing his thumb into the salt-rubbed skin of young blue cheese, he stubbornly refuses to say.

Vella shuns the industry standard hairnet (he says he doesn't have enough hair to need one) in favor of a peaked paper hat that conjures up a 1950s soda jerk. Except, he wears his with the authority of a military officer and looks somehow diminished without it — white hair wisping in all directions, enormous ears dominating the sides of his head.

Vella's father, Gaetano "Tom" Vella, bought Rogue, then a defunct dairy, in 1935 from a farmer in The Dalles. The senior Vella had been making cheese for dairy giant Kraft in Sonoma County and had convinced J.L. Kraft that when war broke out, he'd need a dairy supply far from the ports of San Francisco. Tom Vella brought along his 11-year-old son to meetings with Kraft so that the senior Vella, a Sicilian immigrant who had shaky faith in his English skills, could quiz the boy on the way home to find out everything the dairy executive had said.

So Ig Vella spent his summers immersed in grunt work at Rogue, sleeping in the cottage — built by his father in 1937 — that still stands next door to the squat cinderblock dairy.

But the younger Vella, who says he was kicked out of his Sonoma high school for "hell raising," had another career in mind: baseball. A left fielder who played on some minor league teams around the Bay Area, Vella made it as far as a tryout with the Chicago Cubs. But he was rejected because of nerve damage in his arm.

"I stuck it in my grandmother's [laundry] wringer when I was 4 years old," Vella says, hiking up the sleeve of his right arm to show a blurry scar near the elbow. "I couldn't throw hard enough."

Instead, Vella studied history at the University of Santa Clara, did officer training with the U.S. Air Force and fought in the Korean War. "I discount my military duty because it's the war everybody's forgotten," Vella says. "But I bear no rancor about it. I never had a yen to be a professional veteran anyway."

He went back into his father's business and started "to really, really pay attention to cheese making." In 1957, he helped install the blue cheese operation in Central Point. In 1964, he took a 17-year break from cheese and served as a Sonoma County supervisor, Sonoma County Fair manager and delegate to the Association of Bay Area Governments. His time in public service was sometimes contentious. As the Santa Rosa Press Democrat newspaper put it in a late 1990s profile, Vella "conducted his public life like a wrestler conducts a symphony."

But like his military service, Vella's time in politics isn't something he dwells on. He tells the story of his father, a decorated Italian army veteran of World War I, preparing to get on a ship in Palermo for a new life in America and throwing all his military medals into the sea. "Maybe that's where I get it, this not wanting to live in the past."

Except perhaps to resurrect old Italian cheese recipes, Vella leaves the past alone. And retire? How could he, when there's so much work to be done? But Sally, his wife and the person he calls his greatest critic, prevailed upon him several years ago to find a buyer for Rogue instead of parceling out his time and energy between cheese operations in California and Oregon.

Vella turned down three hefty offers from people who wanted to buy the Rogue brands but shut down the plant. He wouldn't do it — too committed to his father's legacy and to saving jobs for what he saw as a beleaguered Southern Oregon economy. "Then I met David and Cary," he says.

Quoting a Robert Louis Stevenson character, Vella refers to Gremmels and Bryant as an extension of his will, calling them his sinews. "They will keep this thing going," he says. "That's all I want."

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Copyright 2005 Oregon Business magazine