Restaurant Awards 2026: Sommelier of the Year, Iori Kataoka

The Vancouver Magazine Restaurant Awards Sommelier of the Year for 2026 Is… Iori Kataoka

Yuwa
2775 W 16th Ave.
yuwa.ca

In 2026, there are a dozen ways to become a sommelier: you can go the traditional route of very pricey wine classes; you can be mentored by an existing pro; or you can lock yourself in a room with a blindfold, a few bottles and The Oxford Companion to Wine. Many somms do all three. But there’s no amount of studying and tasting and shadowing that can make you a great sommelier if you don’t have that trait endemic to even the most accomplished sommelier: an insatiable desire to learn.

For Iori Kataoka, that desire awoke not from a magical epiphany after a glass of Richebourg but from a practical reality: she was running a Japanese restaurant downtown and the then-available sake selection in Vancouver left a lot to be desired. To ensure her guests had an excellent experience, she would have to expand the wine selection. So, she sought out classes and experts to help her figure out a path forward. First, it was famed educators James Cluer, MW, and Lynn Coulthard who helped her understand the basics, but soon what was supposed to be a practical understanding morphed into passion. By the time she teamed up with fellow wine lover Chef Yoshi to open Zest in 2005, she had fully been bitten by the wine bug. In those early days, their combined enthusiasm sometimes outpaced their reality—bottles were stored haphazardly in a warm kitchen before she dragged a cooler from her home to safeguard them—but each year they expanded not only their selection but also the city’s understanding of how to pair wine with Japanese cuisine.

By the time Chef Yoshi and Kataoka parted ways—he to open Stem in Burnaby, she to create Yuwa—her wine list was unquestionably the best in any Japanese restaurant in town. And yet the drive to learn and to expand never stopped. Each year she’d submit the list to the Vancouver International Wine Festival and each year she’d expand it based on the judge’s recommendations: adding a region here, something with some bottle age there (she was given the platinum award, the highest available, last year). Fantastically, her path has recently come full circle—the sommelier who started her journey because there wasn’t sufficient great sake in town now has one of the coolest, cultiest sake lists in North America. Whereas her vacations used to take her to the great wine regions of Europe, she now travels frequently to Japan to meet and cultivate the new generation of cult sake producers.

The end result is a masterclass in cross-cultural fusion: diehard oenophiles who have migrated to sake under her tutelage on the one hand, and classical Japanese diners who now go gaga for riesling on the other. It’s a community of trust she’s created through her passion and expertise, but it’s still just one snapshot on a journey that, for Kataoka, will never end.

Find more of the best Vancouver restaurants on our list of 2026 Vancouver Magazine Restaurant Award winners.