- [Adam] I love cheese, so why not head to Michigan's original cheese shoppe?

- Well, Wilson's Cheese Shoppe is 85 years old.

We're Michigan's original cheese shoppe.

We're the oldest cheese shoppe in Michigan.

We specialize in cheese and all the things that are cheese adjacent.

Anything that you can put on your charcuterie board, we're gonna try to have for you.

- [Adam] Ryan and his family own and operate the business they took over in 2014, and they haven't stopped producing the cheese that made them famous.

- [Ryan] Pinconning cheese is a special formulation of a Colby cheese.

I like to tell people, if you get a Colby cheese somewhere else, it's gonna be kind of like our medium mild.

So we'll have our mild cheese that is our squeaky cheese, so it'll squeak in your teeth.

Very mild.

It's a fresh cheese, so everybody seems to like that.

But the other thing that makes Pinconning cheese special is the fact that you can age it out.

So we have a sharp that's one year, extra sharp that's three years old, super sharp that's six years old, all the way up to a 15-year-old cheese.

And that really has a bite to it, and that's something that's really special to it.

At any given time we have 50 to 60,000 pounds of cheese just here aging.

So we get all kinds of different varieties within that.

- [Adam] Now the story of their signature cheese involves a father and his daughter, Inez, who was ahead of her time when it came to marketing.

- [Ryan] Dan Horn, he was a transplant from Wisconsin to Pinconning.

There was a ton of dairy farms in the Pinconning area.

They were looking for something to do with their milk.

So cheese was kind of the thing.

He made a formula of cheese, the Pinconning cheese recipe that didn't require as much refrigeration as a lot of other ones.

So instead of necessarily a refrigerator, it was more like cellar was good enough for Pinconning cheese, which made it special.

And that was 1915.

A few years later, 1939, Inez Wilson and her husband, Lawrence, decided they wanted to get into the cheese business and sell cheese.

So they built a store next to the factory and kind of built from there.

When you talk about her being a marketing guru, she was the one who really pushed for Pinconning to be the cheese capital of Michigan.

So she really did have that.

She did a lot of different advertising downstate, 'cause she knew where everybody was coming from.

- [Adam] She's also responsible for the now iconic mascots of their business, the giant mouse.

One sits on top of the store and the other has been parade stable for decades, and now a roadside attraction, as was her plan.

Families stopped to get their photos by the giant mouse and then head inside to check out the cheese.

- [Ryan] We have a 20 foot case of just cheese.

So in there you're gonna have imported cheeses, flavored cheeses, whether it's cheddar, or processed cheeses, 20 plus flavors of cheese curds.

And then we have flavored string cheeses, whips, which is just like a skinny string cheese.

We have different variations of aged cheese, whether it's a Canadian cheddar, we have one that's seven and a 10 year Canadian cheddar.

We have our Pinconning cheese that goes to a 15.

And then we also have a 16 year cheddar that's out there.

So we have all kinds of different just variations of cheese, and definitely into the hundreds on that, 80 plus cheese spreads with some seasonal rotations in there.

So it's always fun to check back, see what we have, whether it's a pumpkin and caramel apple in the fall, we do a key lime pie and a lemon meringue in the summer, peppermint bark in the winter.

So just different variations in there that I think people have fun seeing what we have there too.

- [Adam] With all the options, it can be hard to pick what cheese to take home.

That's why they offer samples.

- [Ryan] You want to know what you're getting before you buy half pound.

So we do those samples.

Squeaky cheese, we have the squeaky cheese connoisseurs.

Those are the people who've been coming here for 40 years.

Is it squeaky today?

I'm gonna let you try it.

Being able to do that, 'cause it, and cheese is kind of an interesting animal on the making end of it, because it can be, you can do everything the same, but you have different, it's live enzymes and things like that that are working together that create kind of a little bit of a different product if you're doing that all natural stuff.

So I want people to try it.

I want you, hey, is this this what you want?

So there's that and then there's just, what's new?

And the fact that we do have that rotating cast of cheese, getting somebody to try something new.

Take those, do the samples.

- [Adam] Ryan values the tradition they have of being a family oriented business, and the whole team at Wilson's appreciates the role they play as a destination on the trip up north.

- We have these families that come through and they'll tell you, "Oh, I've been here 40 years."

Or you'll have an older gentleman come in and like, "Yeah, I've been coming here 60 years, and then that's my daughter, and then that's her kids."

And I've had up to four generations out there taking a picture by the mouse.

It's really cool to be a part of that, 'cause that's their stop on the way to like the cabin or the cottage, and being a part of that is something I kind of, it's an important part of that ritual going north for a lot of people.

So it's something that we like to stay tied to tradition with that.