Lesson 1: Sauvignon Blanc

The wine: 2008 Robert Mondavi Sauvignon Blanc

The lesson: acid

The pairing: smoked salmon with creme fraiche, capers and dill (sort of)

Wine Snob Hubby printed off a ream of pages from the Culinary Institute of America's online wine classes and gave us a lesson in SauvBlanc.

We sipped the wine. It was tart and I definitely tasted the acidity. Then we took a (teeny) sip of rice wine vinegar, then another sip of wine. The wine was flat. It had totally lost the bite and the character.

We alternated bites of smoked salmon, the creme, some bitter lettuce and capers and dill. This is where it gets interesting.

WSH said eating a caper then sipping the wine was the same as the wine after the rice wine vinegar. Not for me. The caper cut the acidity somewhat for me, but not nearly to the extent the vinegar did.

So... who's palate is better? We don't have a clue. His is very sensitive, obviously.

The wine itself was nice, not as light as expected, so it stood up well to the smoke in the salmon.

I tasted pear and that's about it. The label said citrus and pear. I didn't get the citrus. But (and this is weird, I know) towards the end of my 2nd glass, I took a hearty sip and tasted pear followed by...(drum roll, please)...cactus.

I know, weird. I've had cactus once, in a salad, diced. I didn't know I remembered what it tasted like. Or maybe the wine tasted like I think cactus smells.

But there was cactus in that there glass. That's all this uneducated palate knows.