The advive you are getting to apply one or two stops of compensations is good if your camera's meters is unsophisticated. Newer evaluative meters in the recenr Nikons can handle snow scene just fine without compensation. The are usinf what Niokon calles "RGB" meters and they "know" when some part of the scene is white.
The OP is shooting a Canon, and even newer Nikons don't always get it right in matrix mode. Then again, "right" may be a little too real if the slopes aren't pristine too. You'll want to push the snow *back* to white if it's not actually white in real life in most situations.
So your best bet is to just watch the histogram display and if you are blowing out highlights back off a stop.
I wouldn't back off in whole-stop increments, you're likely to miss the sweet spot. 1/3rd stop increments are best, but half works if you're in a rush.
Fresh snow that's front-lit is pure white though, so you may actually want it to blow to pure white in the print. If you can't see detail in RL, then that's an accurate representation.
Much of the advive above is old, from the days of film camera shooting negative film and centerweighted meters.
Actually, in my case it was from shooting slide film with a spot meter (while my Sekonic might have a center weighting feature I've certainly never used it!) In my experience, there was always enough exposure latitude in negative film to bring snow up in the darkroom, but it was super-hard to get the same levels in a positive or even in an Ilfochrome (and a lot more expensive!) I did neglect to say "Spot meter and..." though.
In a positive, you only get one chance to increase development in the first developer, and if you're off, you've just killed the original. In a six bath kit, pushing requires extra time in the first developer and full time in the color developer, and two whole stops was certainly asking a lot.
I found with Ilfochromes that snow tended to look a bit better blown out than not for landscapes, but that may have been a filtration issue with my enlarger. Certainly anything underexposed tended to look a pretty muddy brownish-white where something right on, or just over the edge of the exposure latitude was very clean and blueish-white. I spent about $75 worth of Ilfochromes on a single print finding it out the hard way.
Digital is different. It is more like shooting slide film then negs. If you must error error by underexpsing, not over exposing. Shoot RAW if the camera allows
Actually, if you must err, BRACKET. Underexposing is going to produce bad noise. It's a judgement call, but in some cases it's better to blow the snow (especially for backlit subjects) and tone it down and add some "good" noise in post processing than it is to underexpose both the snow and the subject, especially where the subject's backlit and the snow is reflecting a lot of light.
Image-wise it's better to fill flash or bounce with a reflector, but there's generally only so much gear someone will haul around and fill flash doesn't work well if you've got snow coming down or being splashed up.
If you're underexposing the overall scene by a stop, you're likely to be underexposing the subject(s) by more that that, and you're going to get bad noise in the parts of the image that are likely to be the most important.
