Born and raised on a third-generation farm in the open plains of Idaho, Shane Moore left Coeur d’Alene in 2004 to build an academic foundation for his favorite agricultural pursuit: wine. He graduated from Washington State University with a BS in Horticulture and a focus on Enology and Viticulture in 2008. A cellar rat throughout his college years, Shane learned the rhythms of the winery from the seat of a forklift while deepening his natural affinity for the land and the vine. Armed with a love of music and wine, a lot of wanderlust, three chords and a guitar, Shane left the Pacific Northwest to explore the wider world. 

For three years, Shane gained valuable experience working in wineries around the globe—in Canada, in Western Australia, and in Israel’s Golan Heights. Shane met his future wife, Claire, while working harvest in Margaret River in 2010, and the pair soon returned to her native Sonoma County in California. Shane joined the Jackson Family Wines team in 2011 as an enologist specializing in Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir, and in 2013 he returned to the Pacific Northwest to assume the role of Winemaker for Zena Crown.

A winemaker, musician, and North Face-wearing lover of the outdoors, Shane is right at home in the granola-meets-Portlandia-meets-grape culture of the Willamette Valley. Shane loves to ski, fish, bake bread and hunt mushrooms—the latter activity, performed at an “undisclosed location” back in Idaho, which typically yields a carful of morels best sautéed in butter and washed down with Pinot Noir. He can nowadays rattle off a pretty mean bluegrass lick or two, even though (he admits) the fermenting wines prefer reggae. Shane lives in McMinnville with his wife and a growing menagerie of heritage bread yeasts, down the street from a haunted hotel.