Over the past two months, my husband and I taught an eight-week wine course to a class of 14 students. Not only was the class informative and hopefully, entertaining, it was also extremely useful for us to create a curriculum that was not too broad or too vague. It was also fantastic to revisit some wine laws that may have slipped our restaurant minds in the past few years.

The joy of describing wine can be one of the most fun jobs I have yet a very daunting tasks for others. We hear so often in our restaurant, "I prefer the driest wine you have." While this may sound cool or sophisticated, it tells me nothing about the style of wine one enjoys. Most table wines poured by the glass in restaurants contain no residual sugar whatsoever, so the majority of the wines are, in fact, dry, if dry means having no sugar. Think hard about what you mean when you tell someone you would like the driest wine on the menu. Do you mean the wine with the least amount of fruit flavors? In that case, you would probably drink an earth-driven Bordeaux or a rustic Barolo or a crisp Sauvignon Blanc. If those are the wines you prefer, then use descriptors like earthy, rustic or crisp. It tells the person selecting your wine, whether it a salesperson, a server or your dinner host, much more about what styles of wine you enjoy.

Someone once said "Food without wine is like walking around in public with no clothes on." As Americans become more interested in wine, you will notice more and more restaurants placing an emphasis on their wine lists, often creating wine and food pairings on the menu to entice the diner to have a glass of wine with one's meal. The idea is to make the food taste better and to enhance the flavors in the dish, all the while drinking the nectar from the gods and, of course, increasing sales. Pairing wine with food has a great deal to do with personal taste but there is some rhyme and reason to it as well.

When is the last time you intentionally purchased a bottle of wine made in North Carolina? If the answer is not recently or never, it is your duty as a North Carolinian to buy a bottle this week.

The health benefits of wine have been developing over the past 5 years as more and more doctors are recommending a glass of red wine to their patients in order to reduce high blood pressure, lower cholesterol and even prevent cancer. What makes wine healthy, and what are its benefits?

As lovers, drinkers and sellers of wine, one goal we are constantly seeking is to find great wines that are food friendly and enjoyable without breaking the piggy bank. Because we drink wine every day, we have to make sure our wine costs do not exceed our food costs. While we are happy to go without dinner one or two nights a week, a liquid diet just doesn't fly with our 2 1/2 year-old.