by Treve Ring | While most of Vancouver was making snow tracks, watching an outdoor-indoor hockey game or getting a membership card for Vancouver’s Gin Society, I was taking on 1,750 different wines at the Vancouver International Wine Festival. Though I gave it my best college try, I didn’t get around to every booth. However, I did sample nearly all of the 110 sparkling wines on the tasting room floor – and most Champagnes a few times each. Bubbly was the theme after all. I’m just doing my job. France has now passed the sabre to Australia for the 2015 instalment, so listen for even more Aussie twang out Vancouver/Whistler way next February (if that’s even possible).

I spent some quality time with the infamous enological iconoclast, Michel Chapoutier. Now forever interred in my databank: “High acidity in wine is like love with a condom. You sacrifice pleasure for security.” And “You don’t need to be a gynecologist to make love. You don’t need to be a winemaker to enjoy wine.” And quite poetically, “Anyone who creates wines must be generous and festive. Without such qualities the creative act is doomed, sterile and vain.”

If you weren’t among 20,000 like-minded drinkers/tasters crushing 30,000 bottles of wine – ka-ching bottle depot – at wine fest (if you were, you might be in the gallery above), hopefully you were stocking up on good whisky before the barrels run dry.

Chalk one up for the little guys. Craft beer production is snatching up market share, while the big boys are sliding in sales. And that’s not even considering Vancouver’s newest source of brews, The Drug Users Resource Centre.

With the west coast’s love affair with fragrant, green crops (hops, naturally), what are we going to do about the upcoming hops shortfall? I may have pinpointed the exact cause; Driftwood Brewery’s spectacular Fat Tug IPA taking Best BC Beer in the 2014 CAMRA Vancouver Awards.

Oh well, if we run out of hops, there’s always kegged SakeOne Momokawa Organic Junmai Gingo saké on tap.

The Scots and their inventions. First bagpipes, and now this. Scottish punk craft brewers BrewDog has teamed up with UK restaurant chain Honest Burger to birth the Brew Burger – a beef burger infused with so much beer it requires ID.

And if you didn’t have enough to occupy yourself now, what with worrying about high acidity and condoms and running out of Fat Tug, you might want to do some reorganizing of records, recycling and your storage locker, seeing as its illegal in some states to use milk crates for anything besides milk.