To hear Diana Brier tell it, her life working with cheese is nothing short of destiny. Take her last name, for example. The first four letters spell “brie,” which, incidentally, is her favorite cheese, the first one she learned to make in its entirety.
“That procedure is so romantic and so delicate and so gentle,” Brier says. “When you’re making a bloomy rind cheese, you get this sweet, floral smell of the curd in the room. You have to take care of that cheese every single day. Every wheel you flip, you evaluate, you adjust the temperature. It becomes what you want it to be. It’s a deeply personal, intimate process to make and age a brie.”
Diana Brier
The cheesemonger, affectionately called the Wonder Woman of Cheese in her industry, is in a rarefied world: She’s one of only 45 people in the U.S. to hold a Cheese Sensory Evaluator certificate from the American Cheese Society. And as the new owner of Valley Cheese & Wine in Henderson (1570 W. Horizon Ridge Parkway #140), she’ll be bringing her expertise—along with new tastes—to Las Vegas’ cheese scene, where she will introduce new epicurean experiences centering around cheese, pairing it with the shop’s beloved wine offerings. (Previous owner Solenne Peyronnin will stay on as the shop’s director of wine.)
Brier’s own journey to cheese began six and a half years ago, when she underwent emergency open-heart surgery and flatlined while in recovery in the ICU. At the time, she was doing financial analytics in Salt Lake City, but that frightening event proved to be a turning point. “When I woke up, it was like, wow, I really don’t want to do anything that I don’t enjoy ever again,” she says.
She wasn’t sure what that meant for her, but while recovering, she took a job at Whole Foods. “I took my first Cheese 101 class, and the left side of my brain and the right side of my brain finally were just firing on all cylinders. And it was like, this is art, this is science. This is human ingenuity that makes people happy,” Brier says. “I just fell in love with it. We have chosen each other, cheese and I. I always say that cheese found me, not that I found it, because I didn’t know what I wanted.”
The gig at Whole Foods drove Brier to learn everything she could about cheese, and she eventually found herself training under a Belgian cheese maker at a ski resort in Park City. She had such proficiency in cheese making—“I was doing everything from receiving the milk to pasteurizing it to completing the entire make procedure for four different classifications of cheeses [and] performing affinage, which is the process of aging cheese by adjusting its temperature, humidity, airflow and time in the cave,” Brier says—that she was approached by the president of Oregon’s Rogue Creamery, the most famous blue cheese creamery in the country, who offered her a Cheese Make Supervisor position. She was the first woman to hold the title in the creamery’s 85-year history.
After her time in Oregon, Las Vegas—its climate, its proximity to her parents in St. George, its culinary excitement—called to Brier, and she knew this was the place where she could make her mark. “I always call [Las Vegas] human fondue, because you just take a little bit from every country and add some alcohol and no one hates it,” she says with a laugh.
She was offered a job at MGP’s Cured & Whey and gained an appreciation for the local culinary industry. “The food scene in Vegas has gotten a little bit more organic, local-focused, farm-to-table. The emphasis is being placed on the quality of the ingredients and not just the ingredient cost,” she says.
This shift has made Las Vegas ripe for the artisanal food experience, and cheese wedges perfectly into that equation. The educational component is the centerpiece of Brier’s plan for Valley Cheese & Wine—she’s updating the existing tasting room with a Swedish air filtration and purification system to allow for a more accurate tasting and learning experience, and plans include various programming in the form of cheese tastings and wine pairings. Eventually, she’d like to make cheese there, too.
“If you can’t make cheese approachable, then you can’t sell cheese,” Brier says. “So I think it’s important to talk to people about it and get it in their mouth and explain what they’re tasting. When you explain the why, you tell the story.”
