Ask a person this simple innocent question... "Do you drink wine?"

And I have long since stopped being surprised by the most common response I receive. "Well I am not a connoisseur" or "I don't really know very much about wine."

And I wonder how it is that a simple beverage (yes I called wine just a beverage) has the power to give so many Americans an inferiority complex?

A history of human beings drinking and enjoying fermented beverages for at least 8,000 years should have led us to a high level of comfort with wine. Add the fact that wine was first fermented in the new world here in Florida, by the early Spanish explorers, and that should only bolster Floridian confidence with wine (yes...that's right 300 years before California even became a state, Spanish explorers were fermenting native wild grapes they found here in Florida into wine).

Yet, instead most people feel they don't know enough and clearly don't know as much as the "experts" do. Sadly this leads many to avoid wine drinking and which only reinforces the "wine snob's" control of the world of wine.

There is certainly nothing to fear about a bottle of juice and to put it quite simply, wine is only fermented juice. Fermentation or to be REALLY scientific, zymnosis, are both very technical words to describe how yeast converts sugar into alcohol, and thus creates wine.

So some very fancy words are used to take a bottle of juice and make it a bottle of wine. Grapes are the most common source of juice for wine but by no means the only source. From areas all around the world the juices of native fruits, berries and vegetables are used to create some spectacular wines. Here in Florida things are no different.

So don't be fooled into thinking you have to be a connoisseur to enjoy wine. CHEERS!