Wine – The Sipster's Guides with Luke Whittall

1st Annual Sippie Award Winners

It’s the first annual SIPPIE AWARDS and here are the WINNERS!

Modelled after the BC LG awards, the Sippies are my way of telling you about all kinds of Canadian wines. I’ve written about some of them but there are often others that I can’t include in my books for various reasons (they might be too expensive or limited to one single vintage). I still think you should know about these wines because they are all fantastic wine drinking experiences!

In this episode, I talk about the best wines I had the honour of tasting last year. Amazing experiences with amazing wines.

Next week, I will reveal the Sippie Wine of the Year!

See the full list of winners on Sipsters Icons.

Listen to this week’s podcast here or on your favourite podcast player.

Email me your experiences at sipsterswinepodcast@gmail.com!

Purchase copies of “The Sipsters Pocket Guides” here!

Support Sipsters by subscribing!

Thank you for listening!

1st Annual Sippie Awards

Here’s a little bit of fun to start off the podcast in 2024. It’s the first annual SIPPIE AWARDS!!

Modelled after the BC LG awards, the Sippies are my way of telling you about all kinds of Canadian wines. I’ve written about some of them but there are often others that I can’t include in my books for various reasons (they might be too expensive or limited to one single vintage). I still think you should know about these wines because they are all fantastic wine drinking experiences!

In this episode, I talk about the inspiration for these awards and present you with this year’s Honourable Mentions.

Look for the top list of Sippie winners next week and in two weeks, I will reveal the Sippie Wine of the Year!

Listen to this week’s podcast here or on your favourite podcast player.

Email me your experiences at sipsterswinepodcast@gmail.com!

Purchase copies of “The Sipsters Pocket Guides” here!

Support Sipsters by subscribing!

Thank you for listening!

Chilling with Sue-Ann Staff, Part 1

This is the second podcast that I recorded while travelling in Ontario. The voice you heard at the beginning belongs to Sue-Ann Staff, from Sue-Ann Staff Estate Winery located south of Jordan, Ontario on the top of the escarpment.

Sue-Ann was such a bundle of joy to chat with. She had prepared a wonderful tasting through some of the key wines in her portfolio and chatted about the long and storied history of the land she now farms as well as her own history as a winemaker. This podcast has it all – century-old grapevines, American outlaw gangs from the old west, and tons about Icewine that you never knew from a winemaker that knows it better than anyone else in the country.

This episode is Part 1. Part 2 is coming next week.

Listen to this week’s podcast here or on your favourite podcast player.

Email me your experiences at sipsterswinepodcast@gmail.com!

Purchase copies of “The Sipsters Pocket Guides” here!

Support Sipsters by subscribing!

Thank you for listening!

Catching up with Noelle Starzynski

Noelle Starzynski, wine marketer extraordinaire, joins me on the podcast this week. She is perhaps best known for her work with Lakeside Cellars in Osoyoos, BC where she has been working for the past 5 years helping to build their brand and hospitality program. I first met Noelle in the middle of the last decade and we have been running into each other at various events and stores ever since. We didn’t see much of each other during the pandemic of course. Events started back up just as I was getting this podcast started last year but was only recently able to follow through on her threat to make an appearance on it, which happened right before I was to set off to Ontario a couple of weeks ago. It’s a fun conversation filled with mystery wines (including a beautiful Ferox Merlot from Virgil, Ontario) and excitement. Clearly, we had lots of things to talk about.

Listen to this week’s podcast here or on your favourite podcast player.

Email me your experiences at sipsterswinepodcast@gmail.com!

Purchase copies of “The Sipsters Pocket Guides” here!

Support Sipsters by subscribing!

Thank you for listening!

Wine art at Rigour and Whimsy

This week’s podcast was recorded last summer at Rigour and Whimsy Winery in Okanagan Falls. This is the unofficial Part 2 from the episode I did with Jess Hopwood from Farm to Glass Wine Tours. If you haven’t heard it, it is totally worth going back to listen to it. I had planned to cut this into Jess’s episode but the tasting went longer than I thought and Jess and I talked WAY longer than I thought so I’ve given it its own podcast.

You will hear the voices you will hear along with Jess and I is Rigour and Whimsy owners Costa Gavaris and Jody Gavaris, the team behind this super-creative winery up behind Peach Cliff in Okanagan Falls. It was tons of fun and the wines were amazing and super-expressive. One of them may even end up in a future book somewhere…

Listen to this week’s podcast here or on your favourite podcast player.

Email me your experiences at sipsterswinepodcast@gmail.com!

Purchase copies of “The Sipsters Pocket Guides” here!

Support Sipsters by subscribing!

Thank you for listening!

When Wineries Don’t Get it Right

You never know who you’re going to meet when you work at a winery. This is a recent conversation with Kaila Kliewer, formerly a wine sales professional on the coast with a background in hospitality, who I actually met 10 years ago! (That’s a good story too…) We share a similar interest and appreciation in wine but also a similar point of view over the industry from the perspective of working at VQA stores. She shares some stories about her experience in wine and also a not-so-good recent experience at a winery that left her frustrated.

Out stunt wine in this podcast is the OAK Estate Winery Lavish.

**PLEASE NOTE – The winery that Kaila is referring to was not pictured in her photo nor was it OAK Estate Winery. The actual winery where her experience took place is not important. **

Listen to this week’s podcast here or on your favourite podcast player.

Email your answers to this week’s Big Question, your comments or questions, or your special wine experiences to me at sipsterswinepodcast@gmail.com!

Support Sipsters by subscribing!

Thank you for listening!

That One Time in a Tesla

If it’s one thing I’ve learned from my years of producing a podcast, it’s that I can plan anything I want to, with as much detail and precision as I am capable of, but in the end the results are usually out of my control. I don’t have a journalism background and therefore, no training about how to maintain perspective or ask the tough questions or anything like that. Sometimes, I just have to go along for the ride and see where it takes me.

This is literally what happened with I met Jess Hopwood and spent the afternoon zooming around in her Tesla talking about wine touring. Jess owns and operates Farm to Glass Wine Tours, an extraordinary eco-conscious wine tour venture offering high-level private tours all through the Okanagan and Similkameen valleys.

Jess with a recent vintage, Chateau de Laine perhaps?.

My original plan was to drive around, chat about wine touring, and maybe get a little of that Tesla road ambiance at the same time. Jess, whirlwind of enthusiasm that she is, had more ideas. In this podcast, we talk Tesla’s, EV’s, emissions, visit a winery, and then taste a wine back at Sipster’s HQ. It is a fantastic conversation and, like the tours that Jessie offers, an amazing experience.

She also has a special offer for listeners of the Sipster’s Podcast. Listen for the special code to get 15% off any wine tour from Farm to Glass Wine Tours. She even made a special Sipster’s page on her website that has more of a backstory about how this podcast came to be.

Listen to this week’s podcast here

The Other One with Laura Milnes

This is Part 2 of my conversation with the one and only Laura Milnes, she of Crushable Wine Club fame and persistent purveyor and steadfast supporter of Canadian wine and wine culture.

Listen to this week’s podcast here

The One with Laura Milnes

I first met Laura in early 2018, I believe through social media (although it was a bit of a blurry time in my life at that point so I might be wrong). In any case, we spent the afternoon chatting about wine and looking at the lake in the warm spring sun. Laura was not like other people that I had talked to about wine. Her questions to me where very different and I liked that immediately. We stayed in touch and I always thought back to that conversation and how great it would have been to capture it for a podcast. Problem was, I wasn’t doing a podcast at that time.

However, within the year she created a vlog to accompany her blog, called Silk and Coupe and she invited me to be a guest on it. She interviewed me about my first book, which hadn’t even been released at that point) and we again went our separate ways. But we stayed in touch casually over the years and when I found out that she was going to be in the Okanagan visiting family, I jumped at the chance to finally get a podcast interview with her.

Her evolution as a wine personality is unique in that she has experience with all of the major wine producing regions in Canada. In this chat, we get into Dad Wines & Natty Bros, and how she learned to hold a wine glass properly. Of course, the infamous Titty Tees will make an appearance too. She’s outspoken, opinionated, very well spoken, and informed. Enjoy part 1 of my conversation with Laura Milnes.

Crushable Wine Club

Listen to this week’s podcast here

The One with Eagles in the Distance

It’s another flashback episode this week featuring Steve Venables from Forbidden Fruit Winery in the Similkameen Valley. This is a slightly ASMR interview since it was recorded outside in February on a beautiful day while sitting near the banks of the mighty Similkameen River. This was originally recorded February 2012.

During the pandemic, I had to really temper my habit of stopping in to places to say hi and catch up but am slowly getting back to doing that whenever I can. I visited Steve just last spring, stopping in to say hello, and we talked about recording this interview. With that memory flooding back, I thought it would be great to revisit and share it with all the sipsters out there who might appreciate growing things naturally and learning that ‘organic’ is more than just a way to grow food.