NICOLE MANESS

Partner, Resilient Habitat at Willamette Partnership

As Resilient Habitat Partner, Nicole Maness focuses on building the science-based tools to support incentive programs for aquatic and terrestrial habitat and works with policymakers and stakeholders to implement innovative approaches to restoration throughout the Pacific Northwest. Prior to moving to Oregon, Nicole was the Executive Director of a think tank at the University of British Columbia that dealt with forest land-use policy in BC.  She holds a BSc in Environmental Science from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. When not thinking about conservation, Nicole enjoys exploring the backcountry wilderness, playing the piano, and attaining new levels of patience and optimism as she restores her house in Corvallis.

MICHELLE MOYER

Associate Professor / Viticulture Extension Specialist WSU Prosser IAREC

Michelle Moyer is an Associate Professor of Viticulture and Statewide Viticulture Extension Specialist, based at Washington State University’s Irrigated Agriculture Research and Extension Center in Prosser, WA. She received her bachelor’s degree in Genetics and Plant Pathology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her doctorate from Cornell University at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, majoring in plant pathology and working on risk assessment for Grape Powdery Mildew Management. Michelle’s current research focus is on basic vineyard management as it interfaces with other management decisions related to disease, pest, irrigation, and vine nutrition. Her Extension focus is on general viticulture education and pest management decision support. Michelle joined Washington State University in 2011.

JANCIS ROBINSON

jancisrobinson.com

Voted the world's most influential wine critic in polls in the US, France and internationally in 2018, editor in chief Jancis views herself as a wine writer rather than a wine critic. She writes daily for JancisRobinson.com and weekly for the Financial Times. She is founder-editor of The Oxford Companion to Wine, co-author with Hugh Johnson of The World Atlas of Wine (nearly five million copies sold) and co-author of Wine Grapes, each of these books recognised as a standard reference worldwide. The 24-Hour Wine Expert (2017) is a slim paperback guide to the practical essentials of wine.

In 1984 she was the first person outside the wine trade to pass the rigorous Master of Wine exams and in 2003 she was awarded an OBE by Her Majesty the Queen, on whose cellar she advised from 2004 until 2022. In one week in April 2016 she was presented with France's Officier du Mérite Agricole, the German VDP's highest honour and, in the US, her fourth James Beard Award. She now has six, including being the only wine writer elevated to the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame. In 2018 she launched her own hand-made, dishwasher-friendly, ideal wine glass.

​

She loves and lives for wine in all its glorious diversity, generally favouring balance and subtlety over sheer mass.