No, I taste my cheese before vac sealing it. But I also make cheese in 5 gallon (roughly 5 lb) batches, so I want to break them down into what we can eat reasonably in a short period of time.
I don't have a hygrometer in my cave or the ripening box, so I'm not sure of what the RH is. However, the cave (mini fridge) gets some moisture buildup on the back wall where the refrigeran runs through, so I'm guessing it's pretty high. If I leave a cheese in the ripening container for more than a couple of weeks with the lid completely on, I do get mold issues.
then I have to take the cheese out, clean it up, clean up the container and put it back in the cave, but I leave the lid skewed so that it is only about 3/4 covered. That seems to slow down the mold so that I only have to clean it off about every two weeks.
Nowhere near IL - we live about an hour from Minneapolis/St Paul, MN in west-central Wisconsin.