The Public Eye: Merry Edwards

During her thirty-three year winemaking career, Merry has earned the universal respect of winemaking peers, grape growers and academicians. A self-described perfectionist, she has constantly refined her vineyard practices, wines and techniques.  Merry does not rest on her laurels; she grows.Food was Merry’s gateway to wine.  She recalls, “When I was a teenager my mother had cookbooks produced by the California Wine Advisory Board.  Wine was an ingredient in every recipe, so I started cooking with wine.”
Fascinated with food chemistry and fermentation in particular, Merry brewed beer as a simple extension of making bread and working with yeast.  Then she purchased a book on home winemaking and began to ferment fruit wines.  In 1970, when Merry earned her B. S. degree in Physiology from the University of California at Berkeley, her friends knew her as the accomplished amateur who made " The Merry Vintners" wines.
In 1971, while attending graduate school in nutrition at U. C. Berkeley, Merry met Andy Quady who was studying winemaking at the University of California at Davis.  “Looking through Andy’s books, I
became fascinated,” recalls Merry.  “I was surprised to learn one could study winemaking as a discipline.”  Within a month, Merry shifted her graduate studies to wine at U. C. Davis.  In the winter of 1973 she earned a masters degree in Food Science with an emphasis in Enology. Of the three women in the masters program, only Merry became a winemaker.