Though Patrick Merry has been making wine for many years, he didn’t open Merry Cellars until 2004. As a winemaking hobbyist, he found his potential for growth was limited.
“It came down to wanting to make more wine than I legally or financially could,” he says. So Merry put his MBA to use and founded Merry Cellars. During its inaugural year, the winery released 500 cases of wine. Since then, the operation has grown, and Merry plans to produce 2,000 cases this fall.

Merry came to the area to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science at Washington State University. During a break from his studies, he completed the viticulture and enology program at WSU. Now a professional winemaker, he still hasn’t finished his doctorate.
“This was never meant to be a full-time occupation,” he says. “(Winemaking) has occupied far more of my time than I thought it would.”

Merry Cellars relies on a small, dedicated group of family and volunteers to produce its annual releases. Merry’s father, mother, sister and brother come from Billings, Mont., for the three months of the harvest and 12-14 additional volunteers help with picking, transporting and crushing the grapes.
Merry works with vineyards throughout Washington to get grapes for his wines. Though he has worked with as many as a dozen vineyards in the past, Merry says he relies heavily on about six.

The harvest day starts well before dawn, Merry says, while the grapes are still chilled from the cold night before. His crew of family and volunteers harvests grapes in 30 pound buckets, rather than the usual half-ton crate. Using a smaller container treats the grapes gently, he says — one of Merry’s guiding winemaking tenets.
Freshly harvested grapes are hand-sorted, destemmed and crushed the same day, and when the fruit arrives at the workroom in the basement of Pullman’s Old Post Office, Merry Cellars’ base of operation, it is still cold. The speed of processing and gentle hand treatment gives the finished product a much fresher taste, Merry says.

“We’re trying to do things the best that they can be done,” he says. Merry avoids over-processing the grapes, he adds, which allows the varietal characteristics to shine — another facet of his winemaking philosophy.
Most of Merry’s wines are not blended, or are blended very little. His 2005 Carmenere, a bold, spicy red, is over 90 percent pure, blended with a small amount of Merlot. He sold half of the release in just five days.

His signature blend, however, has proved one of his best-sellers. A wine he has been working on since 2002, Merry labeled this year’s release with two different names. One is called Twilight Hills Red. The other is named simply Crimson, with a label featuring a photograph of a turn-of-the-century Cougar football team. Merry co-labeled the product believing that outside of the immediate area, the reference wouldn’t be understood, but he was mistaken.
“We will sell out of this well before our next release,” he says. Under either label, the wine has proved immensely popular — when the spring newsletter was printed in March, only 40 cases remained of 104 produced.

As a quickly growing business, Merry Cellars is preparing to expand. Though the space the business occupies will remain its home for the immediate future, Merry is planning to start offering custom labels in the next few weeks.
He also plans to start paring his selection down, focusing on making select wines extremely well rather than spreading himself thin with a wide variety of reds and whites — the 2005 release features more than 10 different selections.
While creating a variety of wines is enjoyable, Merry says, it is hard to turn down a distributor who wants 50 cases because the winery only produced 33 of that variety that year — a situation he has been in before.

The Merry Cellars wine club, referred to as “the family,” is another area where Merry plans to shake things up. Members receive a 15 percent discount on all wine they buy and have access to winery-only and limited production wines. Soon, they may get another benefit.
“We have this thing called the ‘frankenbarrel,’” Merry says. “It’s basically the leftovers (from other batches of wine).” But over time, he says, it has turned into a rich, complex “mutt” of a red that he plans to offer to wine club members only at a special tasting party.

But for right now, Merry plans to keep doing what he has turned from a hobby to a profession — making good wines well.

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