The Manchega ewes are milked twice a day and the raw milk goes straight into the vat.
Lorenzo Carrasco is fifty-eight and has six hundred Manchega sheep in Herencia. He takes them out to the cereal stubble every morning, as his father did. He set up the dairy himself in 1985.
His daughter Gema is twenty-nine and makes the cheese. She studied in Madrid and came back meaning to make it only from their own sheep's milk. Lorenzo says that at first he did not believe her.
Gema says co-op Manchego is good and hers is something else. Every cheese is made with milk from a single flock. If she stops, Lorenzo sells the sheep and Herencia has one flock fewer.
