It's a bit confusing, but I think the easiest way to look at it is there there are potentially 2 things you want to accomplish: 1) get b. linens to grow 2) create a thick, flexible rind. These are 2 separate things and for some cheeses, you don't always want to do the second one.
B. linens is a bacteria. It likes salt (and I've heard it requires some salt to grow). It likes humidity. It requires a high pH (usually above 5.8, but some varieties start at 5.5 and others all the way up to 6.0). That last bit is really the most important. B. linens will never grow to any degree below that pH. This means that you have to grow something *else* on the rind until the pH rises high enough for b. linens to get started. Normally most people grow geotrichum in the interim, but there are actually a number of different yeasts or molds that will do the trick as well.
You can easily just grow geotrichum on the rind for a few weeks, wash it off with brine and then wait for the b. linens to grow. That's the easiest way to get b. linens growing, IMHO. You don't have to wipe that hard -- just hard enough to take the geotrichum off :-) This is not always the way you want to do it, though.
One of the reasons for getting a schmear going on a cheese is because you want to seal it up and get a flexible rind for when you are growing eyes. For cheeses with eyes that traditionally have a b. linens rind, you're actually preparing the rind for the warm phase. You want a nice thick rind that is flexible so that when it expands, it doesn't crack. To do this, you wash with a brush or cloth with round motions, bringing up a cheese paste. Then you spread it around. You keep doing that every other day (normally you do one side one day and the other side the other day). You just keep bringing up that paste and spreading it evenly around, doing each side every other day until you have the thickness that you want. Then you stop. Normally when you do this, you end up with a lot of moisture on the rind, you have a lot of available food (because the paste is full of easily accessible lactate) and so yeasts grow in it quickly. That brings the pH up and you end up getting b. linens growing very quickly. You usually have this thick, gummy, orange or red paste that you are brushing around the rind eventually. Then you stop washing it and let it dry nicely (often coinciding with the warm phase). It gives you a nice thick, flexible rind that doesn't crack when the cheese expands.
Another reason for getting a schmear going is to stop the cheese from being able to grow blue mold. As you wash each side every day, you are disrupting the mold growing on it and flattening everything out. Blue doesn't really like that. Eventually b. linens grows and it will *always* out compete blue (and pretty much everything else). You end up with a thick rind of b. linens that nothing else will grow on and nothing can penetrate. It makes it easy to age. This is the end game of a lot of alpine cheeses. I have heard that even dutch cheeses used to do that regularly 1-200 years ago (but had much thinner rinds).
Of course, the b. linens will have quite an impact on the flavor of the cheese -- especially in the rind. My experience has been that if I'm doing a real schmear, I need to be careful to keep the humidity way down after I achieve the schmear I'm looking for, or else the entire cheese can get caught up in the b. linens. However, I make *very* small cheeses (5-600 grams each). I don't think you have to worry quite as much with a large cheese.
I like to make reblochon and some other cheeses with a non-schmear approach -- just grow geotrichum, wash it off once at the 3-4 week mark, keep the humidity up and wait for b. linens to show up. This makes a very thin rind, which suits my small cheeses. Some producers will do a kind of hybrid approach where they will scuff up the rind with salt in the early stages. IMHO this is really about fine tuning the thickness and character of your rind. I wouldn't bother doing anything fancy until you get the basics down.
Hope that helps!
