I drove past a billboard on my way home from Portland last week announcing a wine tasting class at Umpqua Community College’s Southern Oregon Wine Institute.

Wine tasting was such a popular class where I went to college in upstate New York that the waiting list was a year long. I never made it off the waiting list, and since I graduated a thousand years ago, I don’t think they’re going to let me take it now.

Confession: I used to be the kind of person who chose a bottle of wine based on:

• Whether I liked the label.
• How much it cost (under $10 for every day, over $20 for gifts or a special meal).
• Whether it was red or white. If it was red, I bought it.

Don’t hate me. My knowledge of wine was so limited that all I knew about it was that:

• You should probably avoid wine while you’re pregnant (unless you’re French, in which case it’s required).
• The best port is made in Spain and tastes really good poured in the hollow of a half cantaloupe as an appetizer (I learned that during my junior year abroad.)

When you know very little about a vast subject (like wine or Icelandic cinema), no matter how interested you are in it, the subject can seem intimidating.

But once you start learning, you realize that it’s good fun to buy a bottle of southern Oregon wine and figure out what you like about it. Host blind taste tests with your friends and go wine tasting.

Rising Sun Farms tasting room at 5126 South Pacific Highway in Phoenix, Oregon has wine and delicious cheese and crackers.

Daisy Creek’s tasting room (at 245A N Front Street in Central Point) is sandwiched between a chocolate shop, Lillie Belle Farm, and an amazing cheese store, the Rogue Creamery.

Ask regional wine makers and vineyard owners to tell you everything they know about what you’re trying.

We know that drinking a moderate amount of wine is correlated with lifelong health benefits.

It turns out that learning about an unfamiliar subject is good for your brain, offsetting Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases.

According to health guru Andrew Weil, M.D., you don’t have to master the subject (be it a new computer program or a foreign language). Just the act of trying to learn about is beneficial.

There you have it. Whether it be a wine tasting class, your own PWEP (Personal Wine Education Plan), or total immersion by way of the World of Wine Festival, which takes place in Jacksonville, Oregon the week of Aug. 24-27, 2011, your brain will thank you for learning more about wine.