The Sipster's Pocket Guide to 50 Must-Try BC Wines

By Luke Whittall

A perfect pocket guide that collects 50 of the most seek-worthy wines in BC from the wine expert who’s tried them all.

In this handy portable guide to the top 50 British Columbia wines under $50 a bottle, wine expert Luke Whittall abandons the usual language of tasting notes in favour of a more personalized, approachable style, focusing on experiences, good company, and where a wine might take your thoughts.

As a wine industry professional, Whittall found himself inspired more by the way non-professionals talk about wine than the “hints of fresh cherries, dried herbs, and soupçons of eucalyptus” style often favoured in traditional wine writing. Sipster’s Pocket Guide describes the experiences bound up in the tasting of 50 of the most amazing wines this province has produced, including reds, whites, rosés, sparkling, and dessert wines.

With its emphasis on affordability and personal experience, rather than vintner and vintage specifics, Whittall’s guide reads less like the average wine fare and more like tips from a funny, candid friend. Before you head to the liquor store to deliberate over your next sip, take a glance through Sipster’s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Touchwood Editions
• Release date: Nov 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781771513616

Luke Whittall

Luke Whittall has worked in cellars, vineyards, and wine shops since 2005 and is currently a wine instructor at Okanagan College. He is the author of Valleys of Wine: A Taste of British Columbia’s Wine History (2019), co-author of The Okanagan Wine Tour Guide with John Schreiner (2020), is currently working on subsequent volumes of his Sipster’s Pocket Guide series. He splits his time between Okanagan Falls, BC and Toronto, ON.

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This book is dedicated to Miles and Vanessa, who constantly remind me what is important in life.

sipster

sip·ster | \ sip-st r \

: one who observes, seeks, and sets taste trends of sipping beverages,

such as wine, spirits, tea, and coffee, outside of the mainstream.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

SPARKLING WINES

WHITE WINES

ROSÉ WINES

RED WINES

DESSERT WINES

GENERAL TOURING INFORMATION

WINE REGIONS OF BC

CONFESSIONS OF A SIPSTER

SUGGESTED READING

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

We all enjoy wines on different occasions and for different reasons. Unfortunately, many wine-shop tasting bars and winery tasting experiences do not feel like any situation where I could really enjoy wine. The idea of standing up at a crowded tasting bar with forty other people vying for the attention of the staff members behind the bar is not the best way to enjoy a wine, in my opinion. Until the recent pandemic made most of us realize that there were better ways to experience wine at a winery, I felt like I was the only one who was irritated by this. I enjoy my wine sitting at a table, in a comfy chair, on a picnic blanket, or at a reception. When I test drive a car, I want to take it on the road, not drive it around a parking lot with strangers in the back seat.

Wine-tasting notes and reviews don’t seem to help, since they often misplace our real sense of value for wine. They build up wines using long lists of aromas, flavours, and miscellaneous production information. Some of this information is useful for people involved in the wine industry (salespeople, sommeliers, and enthusiasts), but most of it is not going to really help you find a new wine to enjoy.

As the wine importer Terry Theise has said, wine is a moving target. Even expert wine judges, who are certainly highly skilled tasters, can come to different conclusions about the same wine. Human chemistry, environmental factors, and preconceived perceptions about a wine (as simple as being able to see the colour of it before tasting it) will alter how much or how little we will enjoy a wine. As Bianca Bosker says in her recent book Cork Dork, no taste is pure.

There must be a better way to learn about great wines.

HOW WINES ARE TRADITIONALLY EVALUATED: TASTING NOTES

Communicating about wine is a serious issue, for those in the industry in particular but also for people who love to read (or write) about it. It has all become a bit silly over the past few decades because we have not fully developed a language to talk about it. Communication about any art form has this same problem. As the popular quote goes, writing about music is like dancing about architecture. (This has been attributed to the comedian Martin Mull and the composer Frank Zappa, among many others.) How does one distill an art form that needs to be experienced by a person into a form that can be accurately communicated to other people who have not experienced it and cannot possibly experience it at the same time?

With wine, the traditional form of communicating about it has been through tasting notes. These snippets of snappy language appear in newspaper wine reviews, wine magazines, blogs, and apps. They usually list a bunch of aromas and flavours that the writer of the tasting note perceived when they sampled the wine. The writer will likely taste the wine aggressively, a style of tasting that Terry Theise, in his book Reading between the Wines, says aims a beam of concentrated attention directly at the wine, using your palate to take a sort of snapshot. This is the kind of tasting that wine students use when studying wine. There is a technique to it that must be learned and practised regularly to achieve consistency. It is not an easy method, but most anyone (lacking any physical impairment such as anosmia) can learn to do it.

Tasting notes are a relatively new concept in the wine industry, though their ubiquity for today’s wine lovers makes it seem as if they’d been around since the invention of wine. This would be true if wine had been invented in the early 1970s in California, but of course it was not. Credit for the vocabulary that provided the rocket fuel for tasting notes goes to Ann Noble at the University of California at Davis, who developed the Wine Aroma Wheel. The inner sectors of the brilliantly designed aroma wheel contain general aroma groups as they might appear to the person sensing them: fruity, herbaceous, floral, woody, earthy, or chemical, among others. These groups are then broken down over the next sectors, moving away from the centre of the wheel. Fruity breaks down into all of the different families of fruit flavours, such as citrus, berry, tree fruit, or tropical fruit. Those categories can break down even further. If it’s a berry flavour, what kind of berry? Currant? Blackberry? Strawberry?

The Wine Aroma Wheel provides a simple system that has allowed us to create a vocabulary for smells, which is something the English language has never really emphasized. Going back to Plato, our sense of smell was deemed unimportant and unbecoming of a civilized, rational person. There are not a lot of aromatic descriptors or expressions in the English language. For example, take the way in which we might describe cheese. The French language has expressions such as les pieds de Dieu, which is an elegant way to describe the stinky character of some types of cheeses. In French the feet of God, in English stinky. Which one sounds more enticing?

The aroma wheel was a brilliantly simple solution to a complex problem in a language that lacked the vocabulary. For students studying wine, wine enthusiasts, or anyone related to the wine industry in some way, it works. But for me, and perhaps most people, the list of flavours was perplexing at first, particularly for wines from lesser-known regions. (Wet wool? Diesel? I should want to drink that?) Why was it proffering aromas and flavours anyway? What good is that? Shouldn’t they all just taste like wine? So a wine smells like candied strawberries, tastes like dried herbs, and has a long, dry finish. What can I do with that information? The obvious answer is that if you like eating or smelling those things listed under aromas and flavours, then you have a good chance of enjoying the wine. If a wine has notes of cranberries and you, as the wine drinker, do not like cranberries, then what are the odds that you will like the wine? Probably fairly low. What if the idea of tasting cranberries in a wine is completely weird for you? Average wine consumers don’t have a lot of information to go on with tasting notes like this. No wonder people are confused about wine. As Bianca Bosker says in Cork Dork, tasting notes are now badly failing the very people they’re meant to help.

Even if you don’t read wine magazines, newspaper articles, or wine blogs, this style of communication about wine is used in other ways. Verbal versions of tasting notes are frequently a part of the common winery wine-shop experience. Visitors have a small (sometimes pathetically small) sample of wine poured in their glass while the person behind the bar spouts off a list of aromas and flavours that the tasters will experience when they smell and taste the wine. Two things might happen in this scenario: (1) the taster will smell and taste all of the flavours in the wine that the wine-shop host has told them to taste, when in reality they do not taste any of those things; or (2) the taster will feel stupid for not tasting those things and assume they are just not a good enough taster to enjoy the wine. I’m convinced that both of these scenarios factor into the way that wines can taste differently to people once they get back home after their