GREENSBORO, Vt. - At a glance, coming off the dirt road not far from Willey's Store here, past dairy farms on the edge (again) of oblivion, you come upon a braver, newer - actually, futuristic wouldn't be a bad fit - world called Cellars at Jasper Hill.

They are tunneled deep into a hillside that runs down into pasture, blasted out of ledge rock, 26 feet deep at their deepest excavation, the better to keep it cool for aging wheels (and blue-splotched turbans) of cheese.

The facade is jarring given the signature rusticity of Vermont's so-called Northeast Kingdom: The entry is faced in tall glass panels as unblinking and stony-faced as, well, a rest-stop lobby on the New Jersey Turnpike.

"I thought they'd be, you know, caves," said a flatlander, bootied and hair-netted for a brief tour a few weeks ago.

They are - functionally, at least. Though there's no denying that they are charmless, far-removed cousins - faced in reinforced concrete, and lit well - of the natural caves in French mountainsides that gave birth to the art of aging.

There is no question, either, about the quality of the cheeses that emerge - a magnificent, not-found-at-your-local-supermarket Cabot clothbound cheddar, for one, richly caramel-y and moister than its English forebears, that sells after a year down under for about $28 a pound at Philadelphia's DiBruno Bros.

Also a prized, turban-sized blue cheese called Bayley-Hazen, after an early-American military road nearby, produced from the milk of the brown-and-white Ayrshire cows that wander the grassy knoll at the Jasper Hill Creamery next door; also sold in city cheeseries.

But the mammoth cellars - spawned in an ambitious drive to take Vermont cheese to the next level - are a new wrinkle in a countryside alive with artisanal cheese-makers and maple sugarers, grass-fed-beef farmers and Vermont craft brewers.

And if their function is to replicate conditions - clean, humid and 54-or-so degrees - that made French cheese-aging the toast of fromage, their form is still unsettled (and even unsettling) business.

For now, locals decked out in tall rubber boots and white lab jackets tend the cheeses like babes in a nursery, lifting them onto long, wooden shelves, bathing them in salty brine, scrubbing, trimming, draining, turning them gently day after day to help them mature properly.

But for all the handwork that precedes the aging - the care of the cows, the ladling of the curds, the muslin-wrapping (of the top-of-the-line, 35-pound wheels of cheddar, at least, at Cabot Creamery, the dairy co-op in Montpelier, south of here) - a more cold-blooded figure is in the cards for the cellars.

If things stay on track, said Andy Kehler, who with his brother Mateo started making award-winning cheese at Jasper Hill five years ago (and who is now a partner in the cellars project that's something of a common room to age - and market - the cheeses of Vermont producers, large and small), a contract will be signed soon for a Swiss robot.

Yes, a robot.

Kehler fires up his laptop and gives a peek. He (the robot, not Andy) is a blocky, stainless-steel guy with pinchers to grasp and turn the big wheels, and a plate of whirling brushes to give them their briny scrub. On his Web site he's called Robot Sugnaux - and this particular model, Kehler notes, has sight: "Some are blind."

There are 14 different programs for various jobs, though none of them presumably tax-paying, injury-incurring, back-talking - or too tedious.

He costs $257,000, and comes with papers showing that his forebears have performed admirably, including one tireless 10-year-old who has already cured seven million wheels.

Needless to say, some of the humans currently employed in the coddling of the young cheeses are less beamish about Robot Sugnaux, regarding his arrival with thinly disguised suspicion and a small measure of contempt.

Would a smarty-pants robot put the lie to Jasper Hill's claim to careful, hands-on, artisanal crafting?

Not a bit, said Kehler: "There's plenty of handwork to be done. But [with Robot S.] we can take some of the back out of it."

Contact columnist Rick Nichols at 215-854-2715 or rnichols@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/ricknichols.