At that time, I was monastically broke, too broke in my mind to try even a smidgen of this cheese, but I did rip out and save that four-paragraph entry, and nearly a decade later, in the year 2000, working as a magazine writer, I carried that ripped piece of paper on assignment to Spain, where I went to profile the futurist chef Ferran Adrià, whose culinary innovations and 30-course meals, each new dish served in three-minute intervals, seemed to embody the digital speed of our times.

On that trip, I had Sunday off, so I flew from Barcelona to Madrid, then drove up the gut of Castile and back in time to the cheesemaker’s village of Guzmán. It was a lark, perhaps, but it was also a pilgrimage of sorts, my adult self enacting a dream of my younger, poorer self, to try that fabled cheese in that little Castilian village. As I drove, the radio reported more Basque bombings, and the day was so hot, the car tires actually began to melt on the pavement.

I found Ambrosio in the cool of his family cave, or bodega, the place where he aged his cheese. In Guzmán, there existed two dozen or so caves burrowed in the hill that marked the village’s northern boundary. Some of the bodegas were said to date back as far as the Roman occupation of Spain. In a time long past, the fruits of the harvest were brought to the caves and stored — grain, apples and, in particular, cheese and wine, the latter transported in casks made from cured goat carcasses — to be accessed during the harsh winter and spring. Legend had it that a man would sit in a room built above the cave and itemize what went down into the cellars, to report it all back to the lord of the land. This room became known as el contador, or the counting room.

As the families in the village built or inherited bodegas, they also added to these counting rooms, sometimes sculpturing a foyer and perhaps stairs that led up to a cramped, cozy warren that included a fireplace. Soon, people gathered at the bodega to share meals around a table and pass the time. And as the centuries unfolded and the caves came to serve a purpose less utilitarian than social, the room took on the other definition of contar, “to tell.” The contador, then, became a “telling room.” It was the place where, on cold winter nights or endless summer days, drinking homemade red wine and eating chorizo, villagers traded their secrets, histories and dreams. In this way, the bodega, with its telling room, became a mystical state of mind as much as a physical place, connecting the people here to their past.

At that first meeting in the telling room, over the course of eight hours, Ambrosio told me a fantastical story. He was a hulking man with mournful eyes. His voice rumbled along, seemingly without breath. Working closely with his mother, he claimed to have recovered the old family recipe (it hadn’t been written anywhere, of course), and when the villagers first tried that Molinos cheese, they found it so good that they were transported back to their own mothers’ kitchens. As the cheese was passed along, more and more people fell under its sway, until a cheesemonger from Madrid began to sell it in the capital. From there the legend grew: Páramo de Guzmán was sold at Harrods in London, won medals at cheese fairs, and later arrived at Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor. It was said to have been served to the Spanish and British royal families, to Ronald Reagan and Frank Sinatra. Julio Iglesias was a fan, and Fidel Castro liked it so much, he tried to buy Ambrosio’s entire stock.

As the demand for Páramo de Guzmán increased, it was nearly impossible for Ambrosio to keep pace — milking, boiling, harping the curd, cutting it in fine pieces, etc. — and now there were complicated business concerns imposed on what had, at first, been a very simple act of creation. As Ambrosio unspooled the story that day in his telling room, he said he’d asked his best friend from childhood, a corporate lawyer named Julián Mateos, to help him with the logistical complications of a growing operation, and to help him finance a move to a new cheese factory in a nearby village. Somewhere in all of the expansion plans, Ambrosio, the bohemian creator, claimed (though I would later find out that this claim was contested by Julían with equal insistence) to have been duped, tricked into signing his name to a contract and relinquishing ownership of the company.

That is, he’d actually had his cheese stolen.

So, no, I wasn’t going to get a chance to try it, Ambrosio said bitterly. Because he no longer made the cheese.