Our friend the Tablehopper, AKA Marcia Gagliardi, asked me to pass along this notice of her upcoming wine tasting and class. The focus is the wines of Sicily, which are well worth knowing about. Sicily is a vast land will all kinds of different terroirs, from the hot and dry to the cool, lava-dominated soils of the still-active Mt Etna. As in California, all kinds of wines come from Sicily, from the most humdrum of bulk wines to some the most unique and intriguing wines in the world.

What most excites me about the dinner, is that among the featured wines are a slew from the winery called Cos, which is in the southeast portion of the isle, near the picturesque, ancient town of Modica. Cos, quite simply, makes some of my favorite wines of the world, as you can see in this blog post and in the fact that I named its Cerasuolo di Vittoria, one of my 10 best wines of 2008.

Beyond COS, however, there will be other great wines and lots of great info about Sicily. To help her out Marcia has enlisted former Myth/Danko sommelier Alex Fox and James Stolich of CookWithJames, who will be providing some bites and food/wine pairing ideas. Anyway the event is June 3 in North Beach, and you can get all the details here.