My wife and I just returned from an intensive week at the CIA in Hyde Park NY for a "Boot Camp" in Italian cooking. Not for the faint of heart or those with little or no kitchen skills. It's a fairly exhausting grind to cook full out for five hours a day non-stop starting at 7:00am and ending after dinner at 10:00. Some lectures on regional Italian cuisine and ingredients, brief demos on proper rissotto, making pasta, sauce prep, tasting the dozen or so dishes that were prepared each day by the 12 students (all of us were 50+) in the class then wine pairing/tasting, cheese tasting, more lectures and demos. Dinner each night at a different CIA restaurant staffed by students (kids).
The wine portion was run by John Fischer and we tasted a few selected wines from Sardinia, Piedmont and Umbria. Not really very informative and except for a bottle of '04 Ceretto Barberesco Asji the wines were pretty poor quality. All in all the wine portion of the program was pretty weak.