Marissa O’Connor Embraces the Science of Winemaking

Every fall, locals gather at Agronomy Farm Vineyard in Oakham, Mass., to help Marissa (Mertzic) O’Connor ’00 and her husband and other farmhands pick red and white grapes. The couple then uses the native fruits to create small batches of craft wine—all from scratch.

It seems quite the pivot from O’Connor’s chemical engineering background, but she doesn’t necessarily see it that way. There is a special science behind wine making and, in fact, the vineyard was named for the science and technology of making food from plants: agronomy.

“I got really into wine as a hobby sometime after college,” she says. “I liked the science and art of the process.”

O’Connor previously worked as an engineer at Intel for a little over 15 years and has remained in that more conventional technical world on a part-time basis. The Barre, Mass., native works in the process engineering group as a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt at UMass Memorial Health. While that sounds like a martial arts term, it actually involves lean management, or optimizing processes, efficiency, and quality.

“We work on projects throughout the system to help facilitate and drive improvements,” O’Connor explains.

She works with physicians, nurses, technicians, and other staff to understand their problems and challenges, then helps them develop processes and procedures to overcome them. The goal is to “hopefully help them come up with and implement solutions that will support patients who use UMass Memorial as their healthcare system,” she says.

The O’Connors also quickly expanded into the maple syrup business, today making 100% pure syrup from sap collected from hundreds of taps across 33 acres of adjoining forest. It’s a time- and resource-intensive process: Each gallon requires the boiling down of 40 to 50 gallons of sap from sugar maples.

They opened their tasting room in October 2018, where they host cheese and wine tastings, local music acts, weddings, and other events. They sell their wine on site, on their website, and
in stores throughout Massachusetts.

“When you visit, we hope you will have a great experience,” she says. “When you drink a glass of our wine, we hope you share those memories with the people close to you and maybe even bring them back to have a similar experience.”

As a kid, O’Connor loved math and science and intended to go into drug research. This was largely inspired by her parents, who owned a pharmacy.

“I wanted to be involved in finding new drugs to help people,” she says. She found chemical engineering to be both challenging and technical, noting that, “as I got more into it, I realized that being a chemical engineer opened the door to many fields of study.”

Her experiences working on teams through WPI’s project-based curriculum continue to help her today, she explains. Specifically, she honed skills that help her systematically break down big problems to make them less daunting. This helps her both in her career at UMass Memorial and in the day-to-day running of her business. Building a winery requires not only knowledge of winemaking, she notes, but an understanding of marketing, finance, capacity planning, and human resources.

O’Connor continues to give back to her alma mater, first participating in the senior class gift campaign in 2000, and over the years supporting WPI’s Areas of Greatest Need, as well as the university’s scholarship and athletics programs.

“I like that I had to work hard for my degree and that it is respected,” says O’Connor. “WPI taught me a lot about how engineers can help make the world a better place.”