Friends, Romans, tipplers...

There's nothing quite like a beaker full of the warm south, especially if your gourmet holiday embraces the Italian priority of getting together to eat and drink. John Walsh isn't exactly a learner at this, but he threw himself into his studies at Italy's first international wine academy

There can be no greater symbol of Italian positive-mindedness than the sight of a hundred alfresco tables in the Roman snow. Well, not snow exactly. When I landed in Rome, there was snow on the cars at Ciampino airport, but by the time I reached the city it had turned to cold rain. In the Campo de' Fiori, rain spat on the cobblestones and dripped off the glum, cowled face of Giordano Bruno, burnt at the stake for heresy in 1600 – but outside the Carbonara trattoria, a hundred chairs were still being confidently arrayed around a score of tables under a dozen striped umbrellas, beside a handful of vertical heaters – as though a huge throng of hungry tourists were likely to come round the corner and shout: "Hey! Let's sit outside on this lovely evening!"

Sitting outside and eating and drinking and talking are, of course, the only point of life, as far as many Italians are concerned. Time spent on working is begrudged for ever, time spent on normal tour itineraries – traipsing around churches, gawping at frescos – is time frittered away. Quality time is that spent pouring draughts of Nobile Montepulciano into a glass and drinking the result while trying to decide if the insalata tricolore in front of you is better than the one you ate last night. Many British travellers now share this view of time.

Hence the rise of the gastro-tourism holiday, and now its more serious older brother, the gourmet-student holiday. Here, you are not merely a lush and/or a glutton, keen to eat and drink to excess behind the pretence that you're sampling the indigenous culture and drinking deep of the blushful Hippocrene; instead, you are studying Italian cuisine as a foodie connoisseur and attending classes in Italian oenology as a serious wine buff. It's a holiday that says: you are not a tourist, you are Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray from the River Cafe, with a touch of Oz Clarke thrown in.

Serious wine students can head for the newly opened, loftily titled International Wine Academy of Roma, the first of its kind in Italy. The Academy was the brainchild of Roberto E Wirth, a distinguished Swiss-Italian hotelier, whose phenomenally noble visage looms over the entrance hall. Wirth's Swiss family owns the five-star Hassler Hotel, where Roberto is the general manager. The Hassler stands just 100 yards from the Academy, and (as we shall see) offers special accommodation deals to its students.

The Academy is housed beside the famous Spanish Steps that lead from the church of Trinita dei Monti, in the heart of the Tridente. It's a four-storey palazzetto of indeterminate antiquity, done up to resemble a modern gentleman's club. The bar area is dauntingly formal, with its open fire, dark woods, plush armchairs and red-striped sofa. It's designed to look like a place where six people might discuss the structure of barolo, but none would dream of getting plastered. French windows open out on to a charming garden terrace, where they can throw parties for 50 people in warmer months. The dining room doubles as a library, whose shelves groan under the weight of books by three Englishmen who had a hand in starting the Academy: Michael Broadbent of Christie's, Hugh Johnson, the doyen of wine writers – and Steven Spurrier, who is the Academy's oenological brains and "co-ordinator" of the courses.

Spurrier is a legendary figure – an Englishman who opened the Academie du Vin in Paris in 1973, to explain to the French how best to appreciate their own wine. It was Spurrier who, along with Broadbent, set the standard of the wine courses at Christie's, and later tried to bring a little structured learning to the wine-swiggers of California. It wasn't a success; but there's a definite whiff of confidence, a bouquet of cool sophistication, about the Italian wine school – and about its glamorous, ex-Dorchester Hotel general manager, Valentina Morriconi (a dead ringer for Natalie Imbruglia) – that promises well for the future.

The wine class is run by a droll young Roman, called Andrea Sturniolo, in a pin-striped suit and a lot of hair gel. He explains to the class that wine is made simply of grapes, sugar, yeast and heat, combined in various inventive ways; he further explains that wine is merely a by-product of the passionate intertwining of yeast and sugar. "Yeast, she is not interested in making wine," he declares, "just as we do not eat in order to go to the lavatory." The same tone of breezy empiricism informs the whole lesson.

The room is a severe-looking classroom, with a dozen serious desks. They do not have inkwell-holes in the right-hand corners, but remind you strongly of schooldays. The only big difference is that your old desk did not have seven wine glasses on it. Six are for tasting Italian wines, three red and three white; the seventh is for draughts of San Pellegrino. As the morning winds along, and your tongue becomes more coated with tannin, the mineral water starts to seem like rain arriving to irrigate the parched earth.

We were a Babel Tower of Yanks, Europeans and local Romans. I met a brace of ladies d'un certain age, both Bryn Mawr alumnae; a lean and brilliant German neurologist and his horsey blonde wife in a sparkly polo neck and gold earrings; a Danish food lecturer called Helle who lives in Rome with her Italian husband; plus a furtive Australian with a Tintin quiff and the air of a recovering alcoholic; a slender English rose from the north-London publishing circuit; and a swarthy Roman sommelier who'd spent six years in Los Angeles learning fusion cuisine and now speaks like Tom Cruise.

We took to the schoolroom, the wine class and Andrea's tasting advice with alacrity – the English rose twirling her glassful of Aglianico del Vulture so vigorously that most of the contents ended up all over the wall. We canted our glasses against a sheet of white paper, to establish the colour of the wine at its perimeter (in order to tell how old it is). We discovered there are three speeds of aroma – the "varietal aroma" that comes from the grape variety, the secondary aroma from the fermentation process, and the maturation aromas from the wine sitting in the bottle ("So when you smell wine," said Andrea sexily, "you can smell both its past and its future").

We sampled sauvignon, verdicchio and some diluted-mead stuff called Paestum Fiano. We learned a lexicon of new criteria for wine quality – its density, intensity, haziness, length, its "heaviness in the mouth", its "suspension in the glass". We strove to find the right words to describe the colour of each wine (pale straw? Pale gold? Champagne blonde? Michael Douglas's hair?) and essayed some mildly pretentious tasting notes, as if we were Jilly Goolden or Andrew Lloyd Webber. We moved on to reds: chianti, aglianico, barolo. "I know this sounds ridiculous," said the lady on my left, "but there's a distinct note of horse-shit about this one." Two minutes later, Andrea was talking animatedly about "the spirit of the farmyard" and my neighbour was exultant.

You can join the half-day course – a two-hour lesson followed by a four-course lunch in the palazzetto's library/dining room – as part of a weekend break, or go for the hard-core three-day option, which includes a trip to a wine estate in Tuscany and a visit to the vineyards and wine cellars with the grizzled owners. In Rome, you can stay at the Academy itself, in one of its four swishy bedrooms, full of trompe l'oeil swags and creamy pillars. Or at the elegant, old-fashioned Hassler (whose sixth-floor restaurant features a terrific panoramic view of the city's hills and landmarks and some very threatening seagulls glaring through the window).

Or you might try the brand-new, spiffily Sixties-retro Hotel Art, off the famous via Margutta (the site of Gregory Peck's apartment in Roman Holiday and a top shopping street today). If the bar of Hotel Art looks suspiciously like a church, that's because it used to be the chapel of the 19th-century College of San Giuseppe, complete with marble altar and stained-glass windows. When you take the lift to your bedroom, prepare for a shock – each storey is colour co-ordinated in brash, screaming orange, green, blue, lemon and so on.

After two or three days spent identifying the most subtle distinctions of colour, smell and taste, and trying the Academy's avant-garde cuisine (one pudding I tried was "Clementine parfait with extra virgin olive oil, flavoured with vanilla and chilli pepper", and surprisingly delicious it was), your senses will be on hair-trigger alert. No fugitive aromas, no complex concatenation of flavours, no sudden arrangement of beautiful sights will waste their subtleties on you. The best thing about the Academy it that it makes you appreciate every single, cubic millilitre of the liquid that's in front of you. And by the end of this blissful induction course, you find yourself transferring this hectic receptivity to everything you do. Even if you find yourself dining alfresco in the rain, you can stick out your tongue, and think: "Hmm – soft yet acidic, with just a hint of storm cloud." New habits die hard.

Traveller's Guide

Getting there: you can fly on a wide range of airlines, although most non-stop flights are from the London area; easyJet (0870 600 0000, www.easyJet.com) and British Airways (0845 77 333 77, www.ba.com) offer good fares.

Courses: the International Wine Academy of Roma (00 39 06 699 0878, www.wineacademyroma.com) is at the foot of the Spanish Steps. A half-day course on a Saturday costs €195 (£130). Evening courses are available. A three-day course for beginners costs €485 (£325), including a day trip to a vineyard.

Inclusive tours: packages are available that include accommodation at the Hotel Hassler and others, through Gourmet on Tour (020-7396 5550, www.gourmetontour.com).