Mike & Merry Fix: Oral History Interview

This interview is with Mike & Merry Fix of RainSong Vineyard. In this interview, the couple discusses how they started their vineyard and passed it along to the second generation.The two talk about how the vineyard went from an idea to a reality. Mike and Merry met in college through skydiving club at different universities. Now, the couple has been married for almost 55 years. After Mike retired from Nabisco at 52, they could achieve their dreams of owning and living on a vineyard. Mike was always interested in fermentation and Merry wanted to raise a family in the country. After making a three-way trade for land, Mike and Merry started planting in 1985. The first year, they realized how naive they were about the difficulty of producing a vineyard, but they were quick leaners. They learned a lot from a friend who had started a vineyard a few years before them and took UC Davis wine refresher courses to obtain winemaking knowledge.Mike and Merry discuss their successful bottling program. RainSong was widely known for this program until the pandemic in 2020. The two got the idea when they were traveling in Italy and stumbled upon a small winery that allowed customers to bring their own bottles and containers to collect wine directly from the barrel. While Mike and Merry couldn’t do this exact model due to labeling laws, they were able to make it their own by supplying bottles with a simple label. This program was wildly successful and built a great community around the vineyard. Each year, the attendees looked forward to hearing “the bear joke.”Later in the interview, Mike and Merry talk about passing the vineyard off to the next generation. While their son-in-law has been making their wine since 2011, they didn’t make the official transition until July 2019. Now, the vineyard is in the hands of their two daughters and son-in-law. The couple is grateful to keep living on the vineyard and being involved in RainSong on a smaller scale. Now, they do more of the background work and leave the future of RainSong to the next generation.This interview was conducted by Rich Schmidt at RainSong Vineyard in Cheshire on August 3, 2026.