Beppino Occelli

In the world of cheese, Beppino Occelli represents an absolute avant-garde. His cheeses have created a real myth: many actually wonder if he truly exists or if it is just a brand of butter or cheese.

BEPPINO OCCELLI: A LOVE STORY FOR CHEESES

Everything started in the mid-70s, more precisely in 1976. Beppino was an employee seeking something new that could give him more satisfaction than his routine job. It wasn't just an economic factor but a passion he had carried with him since he was a child. It is the passion for milk and all its derivatives. Giuseppe dreamed of giving meaning to that passion, and he finally succeeded.

The beginning was not easy. He had no stables, animals, or materials to produce cheese. At first, it was all in his mind and in the few tools he kept at home.

Was it really possible to become a cheesemaker in the Langhe? In a land with so few recognizable cheeses, practically only the tuma delle Langhe. Beppino always thought he wanted to produce cheeses that were, yes, an expression of his land, but also gourmet products that could contain other natural elements of the Langhe. Therefore, he tasked a series of women from his village to produce cheese. He did this to understand how they could interpret the cheese to put on the table. Many experiments followed that defined the foundations on which the success of the brand is still based today.

THE CHEESES OF BEPPINO OCCELLI

From the recipes of those women, cheeses like Testun, Casutin, Tuma d’la Paja, Tuma del Trifulau, etc. were born. His cellars in the Borgo di Valcasotto, completely renovated by Beppino, contain hundreds of wheels that breathe in the breezes from the Maritime Alps, a favorable climate that has offered these mountain lands the peculiarity of cheese aging for hundreds of years.
Beppino uses multiple types of woods for aging, woods that allow the production of different types of molds, white, pink, green, dark. All with typical natural aromas and fragrances that contribute to the differentiation of the final products. Sometimes we can find Beppino Occelli among the stalls of the most important cheese events in Italy. One of the most notable is Cheese in Bra.

He is an extraordinary person who, if you let him talk about cheese, captivates. He has given value to cheese and above all, he has known how to reinterpret the ingredients of the territory, merging them into milk. His creations are white works of art, and perhaps for this reason, they call him the white knight of the Langhe. After cheese, the great frontier for Beppino has been the butter, which he branded with the edelweiss. A touch of class and simplicity that define his life, his peasant character, and his genius as an entrepreneur in love with the land of the Langhe.