If you look at a map of Germany you'll see the city of Köln listed. For those of us here in the US, it would more likely be recognized as Cologne. It is the fourth largest city in Germany after Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. It is one of the oldest cities in Germany having been founded by the Romans in 38 BCE. It is known as a cultural center with a thriving community of museums and galleries. Yet, there is something else that this city is known for, something that draws our attention to it today, something that is quite unique in a country known for it's beer. Köln is the home of a special style of beer called Kölsch. Not just home, but according to EU agreements it is the only place where Kölsch can be made.

Kölsch is a beer similar to but not exactly like a German pilsner. Where the traditional pilsner is highly hopped, Kölsch has noticible hops but they are less prominent than in the pilsner. It is a clear beer with a bright straw yellow color. The major difference between Kölsch and a traditional pilsner is in the yeast used to produce it. Rather than being brewed with a bottom fermenting (lager) yeast as pilsners are, Kölsch is produced with a top fermenting or ale yeast. The fermentaion is allowed to complete at normal top fermenting yeast temperatures (50-75 F) and then the beer is cold conditioned or lagered similar to the way a pilsner is. This leads to a bigger, rounder mouth feel than a traditional pilsner.

One of the premier breweries in Köln is Reissdorf. It was founded in 1894 and it is known as a producer of Kölsch. As such, I felt it was my duty to procure a bottle and sample it for all of you.

It is exactly as you would expect given the above description. Straw yellow in color, it is hoppy but not bitter or skunky as some German pilsners can be. It is not thin or watered down like American pilsners. It has a slight sweetness that is balanced nicely by the hops. In short, it is an excellent all purpose beer. Light enough to be consumed on a hot day or after hard work or play, yet substantial enough to so that you don't want to just keep powering through one after another. I give this beer a big thumbs up.

One of my fondest memories of growing up in New England were the Fouth of July clam bakes that my Uncle Al used to throw. I would go over his house the night before and work with my cousin David to build the fire pits. There were always three pits, two for the steamed clams and one for the chowder and corn. This left enough room on the kitchen stove for the rest of the stuff the ladies would make. There would be clam cakes (fritters for those that call them by that name) and veggies and sometimes lobster. My uncle would always get a bushel of clams and it was he that taught me the importance of using lump charcoal rather than briquettes.

The food that I liked the best though was always the raw cherrystones and littlenecks. There's just something about the combination of sweetness and tartness of these little buggers that I just couldn't get enough of. By the time I was ten I could open them as fast or faster than the adults. But the thing that made them special was the cocktail sauce. My mom taught me how to make it very early on. Even then I had a hankering for something with a little bite to it so I started tinkering with her recipe until I had it just right. Pretty soon, I became the go to person for cocktail sauce at the family gatherings. I've since turned that knowledge into the basis for my Bloody Marys but that is an entirely different story.

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Some people have asked me why I started out with recipes for dry rubs and sauces. Well first of all, they are things that have a lot of different uses and second of all, they are pretty simple and straight forward to make. So with that thought in mind, I thought I'd share with you a simple way to make use of a sauce and a rub that I've already published here. I call this my Magic Burger and it calls for the use of the Magic Dust and the Carolina Mustard Barbeque Sauce.

A lot of people don't try and get creative with their burgers. They grill it up, slap on some ketchup and mustard and off they go. Maybe they'll add a slice of tomato or lettuce if they have some kicking around the fridge. I think that burgers are one of the best things to get creative with because they are so simple and easy to make. Just the other night I made mushrooms in a red wine reduction and threw that on some turkey burgers that I was grilling up. If you think about it, just about any vegetable can be prepared in such a way as to enhance the flavor of a burger (ratatouille anyone?).

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Well, maybe not really, but I've certainly travelled the world with wine. That is one of the beauties of wine, it allows us a peak into various cultures because the grape is grown all over this wonderful planet that we live on. And while not every environment can grow every grape, there is a grape that will grow in a lot of different environments. Rocky soil, sandy soil, clay soil, limestone, granite, long summers, long winters, hot, cold, dry, wet, you name it and there is a type of grape that grows there. And the vintners of this world do their very best to coax something special out of this plant so that we can have wine.

The earth itself is where it all starts. The soil and the climate combine to impart certain characteristics to the grapes being grown there. This is why in France, there is a concept of terroir or geography of place. (Author's note: Having spent time studying geography at a graduate level I can safely say that this is a concept that escapes most Americans. Which is why you hear terroir spoken of in terms of European wines, but seldom in American wines.) It is a rather simple concept in that it identifies a relatively continguous area of similar soil and similar climate as generally producing similar grapes. For instance, if you have two sides of a mountain with the same soil and a similar elevation such that they both experience similar temperatures, but one side gets a lot of rain while the other side doesn't, then these two areas are of different terroirs. The same goes for a change in elevation such that one area is on average 5 degrees fahrenheit cooler than the other or if one area is primarily limestone and the other is shale. The differences in two wines from the same terroir are typically based on the interpretation of the winemaker although the terrior is usually evident in the finished product.

All of this brings us to today's wine which is from an area that is beginning to be heard from as far as wines are concerned. This is South Africa, the wine region is Robertson and the wine itself is a Merlot from Arabella. This region tends to be very hot but it is known for its white wines (white grapes tend to grow better in cooler climates, but again, many different things can influence the growing of the grape). The wine itself is a beautiful deep ruby color that lets plenty of light through. This is a big wine, 14.5% alcohol, but you don't sense that in the nose. That's because this wine has a wonderfully powerful nose of leather, cigar and tobacco. Just smelling it conjures up images of an old study in some mansion with overstuffed leather chairs and walls of books. On tha palate this imagery continues as there is just a hint of plum and then you are again washed with leather and tobacco with just a bit of coffee to round things out. Very smooth with almost no tannins present. A wonderful sipping wine especially since it can be found for under $15.

Growing up in New England, my family never knew how to properly cook corn. My mother used the time honored tradition of husking the corn, then putting it in a pot of water, bringing the water to a boil and the boiling it until what she considered done. This was usually somewhere between soggy and sodden with the added bonus of having the majority of flavor and nutrients removed for health reasons. Ms Cocktail also grew up in New England and she also suffered from this time honored tradition. It took Ms Cocktail working with a wonderful lady from Iowa who was kind enough to teach us that you brought the water to a boil first, you added the corn and then no longer than 5 minutes in the boiling water. Voila! Perfect boiled corn every time.

I then discovered that you can cook corn on the grill. This adds a wonderful roasted flavor to the corn, unlike anything you can possibly get from boiling it. There are two approaches to grilling corn, either in the husk or shucked. If you grill it in the husk, you should soak the whole ear of corn in water for about a half an hour to an hour prior to placing on the grill. Then grill over indirect medium heat for about 25 minutes, turning two or three times to keep the husk from burning. This essentially steams the corn within its own husk and adds a touch of that roasted flavor to it. The other way to do it is to shuck the corn, spray the ear down with olive oil, then grill over direct medium heat for ten to twelve minutes, turning frequently. This gives the corn a nice roasted flavor with some browning of the kernals to help compliment that flavor.

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I like to think that I have one good eye in the land of the blind. Most of us cruise through life dotting the I's and crossing the T's and never really taking the time to really observe the world around us. Our hectic work schedules and commutes plus our bosses demanding more production out the same amount of time (faster! harder! we've got deadlines!) teaches us that getting a job complete, by any standards is more important than anything else. Add in kid's structured play time (play dates, soccer practice, dance class, etc.) and school requirements (have you seen the extracurricular requirements necessary to get into college lately?) and it doesn't leave much free time for taking in the subtlties around us. It's the little thing that really separate one thing from another, not the big noticible things on the surface, but the complexities burried within everything and everyone.

That's really what the appreciation of wine is, taking the time to notice the subtlties in the liquid being placed in front of you. It can be the color or the smell or the taste, but you're looking to discern the small things that make this wine different from the next wine.  That also the beauty of wine making in general, you cannot rush the process, it takes as long as it takes for the wine to ferment and age and there isn't a thing one can do to change that. Generally speaking, wine and all that surrounds it, is the antithesis of the demands society places on us. It really does teach us that it's ok to take the time to stop and smell the roses or grapes as it were.

What does the above have to do with today's wine? Well, not much but I thought it important to remind folks to slow down every once in a while. Take some time for yourself. Not just the usual 15 minute potty break you give yourself each morning and afternoon either. A real, honest to goodness, hey I'm chilling out so F you, kind of break in the cycle of insanity that is your life.

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Yesterday, I had the pleasure of experiencing my first portfolio tasting from a beer and wine distributor. Let me tell you, this was most definitely an experience. If anyone has ever been to a winery to do a wine tasting you know how they set things up. They will have several (sometimes a few, sometimes a lot) of their wines available for tasting. They pour you a little wine in a glass and you go about tasting this wine using the normal techniques (a topic for discussion all on its own). Now imagine if twenty wineries were all set up in the same room and were giving tastings to fifty people at the same time. This pretty much describes the scene at yesterday's tasting and I believe the clinical term for it is "orchestrated chaos".

In spite of the atmosphere, there were some fantastic and not so fantastic wines there for tasting, however after the first 25 or so wines my palate was trashed. Try as I might to clear things out with the food they had available (As an aside, while very tasty, deep fried shrimp with a sweet dipping sauce is not the best wine tasting food out there) I just couldn't keep up with myriad of flavors being presented to me in these wines. Thankfully, what I wanted to talk to you about today is not the wines there, but one of the beers I tasted when I first got there.

In the midst of all this wine, there was one brewery represented. It was Unibroue from Quebec, Canada. It is a very unique operaton in that while relatively young (it began producing beers in the early 1990's and didn't export to the U.S. and Europe until 1995) it specializes in Belgian style ales. And while their lineup is rather comprehensive it is the very first ale that they produced that stood out to me, Blanche de Chambly.

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Not everything made in your kitchen needs to be really complex in order to be really good. Sometimes, simple is better. Take for instance today's offering, a grilled poblano pepper burger. If you've been following along, the savvy of you will by now have noticed a Southwestern theme to many of the things I've put up recently. That often happens where I'll get hung up on a certain type of cuisine and I'll explore that for a while and then move on to something else. Right now I'm in the Southwest, but as the weather cools, I'll be moving along.

I'm going to take this time to head off on one of my little rants again. What the hell is up with people and orange cheese? You do know that orange is not the natural color of cheese, right? That orange color is from ground annato seeds which produces a tasteless dye added to the cheese. Seriously, the only time I like my cheese orange is when it's a nice combination like Huntsman so that I can tell the Stilton from the Double Gloucester. Otherwise, leave the cheese alone.

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A mole is the little vermin digging a tunnel through your back yard that causes your dog to begin excavating cubic yards of material in a futile attempt to remove that scourge from the face of the earth. Mole (pronounced moh-lay) is a central Mexican sauce that is a mixture (in the local language mole translates as "mixture") of various types of ingredients.

Several years back, I took Ms Cocktail on a surprise trip to 10,000 Waves, a truly wonderful Japanese resort/spa nestled in the hills outside Sante Fe, New Mexico. It is the kind of place that one goes to unplug from the world and do a complete reset of your nervous system. However, one of my co-worker's daughter's roomate (how do ya like that for several steps removed) was the maitre d' of a little restaurant in the historic section of Sante Fe named Cafe Pasqual's. I was told that it would be worth visiting this restaurant and was I ever not disappointed. It was here that Ms Cocktail and I were first introduced to the gastronomic delight that is mole.

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I'm trying to be more open to French wines. Ms Cocktail was never a fan and I've shied away from them for this reason. However, I've determined that isn't going to be the case anymore, I'm going to educate myself on French wines. I quickly discovered that the French do not label their wines by the type of grape juice used in the production of the wine, but rather, by the region where the grape was grown. This region may be allowed to grow only several types of grapes and this lends itself to more blends than a strict single grape variety of wine. At least this is my initial impression, I could have it wrong.

I've been hearing people rave over this or that Chateauneuf du Pape but for the most part, my limited budget can't support my tasting too many of them. My last tasting was from the same general area of France but from a different AOC, Gigondas. This time, I opted for something from that same area again, but again a different AOC, this time it is Côtes du Rhône. Literally translated, Côtes du Rhône mean coast of Rhone which implies that this region is on the hillsides near the Rhone River. Suddenly, this naming convention doesn't seem so strange.

The wine is a 2006 Côtes du Rhône from J. Vidal Fleury. This wine house is the oldest in the Rhone valley, originally founded in 1781. I would hope than during all these years, they would have figured out a thing or two about making wine. I was not disappointed.

This wine has a nice deep garnet color, with enough transluceny to see flashes of light through it when the light hits it right. Very pretty. It's nose presents charcoal and smoke with a slightly spicy aroma. At first you taste a spicy strawberry with a touch of smoke. It doesn't last long but it leaves behind a touch of strawberry. This is a smooth wine without a lot of tannins. I personally think that this would be great paired with cheeses or lamb. I also think that this is a great value as it can be found around $12 per bottle.