lummi island wine tasting sept 18-19 ’26
This weekend open Friday & Saturday 4-6 pm
ah, a few dear faces from a few years back…
Friday Bread This Week
Sorry…our baker is away again this week…
back to regular schedule next week…!
This week’s wine tasting
Decoy Chardonnay ’23 California $16
Blended from several CA central coast vineyards; aromas of sweet mandarin orange and white peach; juicy and vibrant palate of tropical fruit flavors with a hint of oak from its time in barrel.
Angeline Cab Sauv ’24 California $16
Fruit-forward with aromas of lush cherry, cassis, rich cherry, and plum flavors with hints of vanilla and soft oak that over-deliver for the modest price.
Bodega Garzon Tannat Reserve ’18 Uruguay $16
Opaque deep, dark red; opens with enticing, delicious aromas of very ripe, dark fruit and berries stewed in their own liqueur, with lingering notes of spice, herb, and licorice on the seamless finish.
New Paintings by Anne Gibert
new paintings from Anne Gibert
Last weekend we replaced Anne Gibert paintings that have graced our
walls since Covid made public spaces implement health precautions like
masks and social distancing. Last weekend our walls were all updated
with her more recent collection of local scenery and the many critters that abound around us.
(with apologies for this hasty photo…!)
Economics of the Heart: Too Stupid to Lead or Be Followed
It is hard to comprehend how, in just two years, so much traitorous political effort has gone into reducing our United States from the most powerful nation and economy in the world to a pitiful, second-rate autocracy. In just two years of breathtaking incompetence, stupidity, cruelty, racism, lying, graft, and nonstop outright theft from the American people by a tiny handful of joyless multi-billionaires (now of course including the Tweetster) and a rapidly dwindling audience of Fox-news-addicted morons. The Fake President uses his Fake Cabinet, Fake Supreme Court, Fake Republican Party, and nonstop Fake News to make stupid people believe things are true that are not, and that things that are patently false are true.
The broad direction of all of this is to replace the elected government and Constitution of the United States with an autocratic dictatorship that will control everyone and concentrate national wealth into the pockets of a handful of joyless billionaires.
The metaphoric picture that emerges from this dystopian vision is of an impoverished America where workers earn subsistence wages (the lucky ones) or struggle to find food and shelter in a world without compassion, law, or justice. Somehow this vision is supposed to usher in a time of Christian Glory where a handful of white, billionaire, misogynistic men, acting in the name of their cruel, hateful, scheming version of the historical Jesus, take complete control of the “Seven Mountains” of social/civic/governmental organization: Education, Government, Religion, Family, Business, Media, and Entertainment. Thought and expression not specifically authorized will be monitored, limited, and punished with neither due process nor mercy.
We are now living the forty-years-in-the-works plan behind Project 2025, unleashed on the nation in 1980 by the Heritage Foundation-owned-and-operated “Reagan Presidency” and now launching the implementation phase of its wet-dream Dystopian Vision for America. A handful of white male billionaires will somehow enlist the historical Jesus to be the poster child for its massive replacement of democracy with a jack-booted, misogynist, national Christian militia (ICE is the prototype) with an open license to kill anyone for any reason.
Don’t know about you, but that sure as Hell ain’t my idea of Utopia.
This IS the new Civil War, folks, and the good guys have been losing for 40 years. A search through the ranks of contemporary Republican politicians has yet to find more than a handful who actually support the Constitution. The broad majority serve the Tweetster in deference to his demonstrated power to remove them from Congress by supporting challengers. This isn’t a government, folks; it’s a fookin’ crime family, both literally and figuratively. It would appear that if you took all the Republicans in Congress and boiled them down to their basic elements, you would find not a single ounce of Integrity.
A growing majority of American voters want their country back, and their/our voices are having impact on the national dialogue. The emerging topics of political consequence represent a long list of things American voters hate about this so-called Administration, as in “I’m mad as Hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”
It’s not just that the so-called “President” is a self-centered, misogynistic, lying, cruel, mean-spirited man of limited intelligence and a complete inability to tell the truth about anything, to anyone, at any time. His only documented achievements are breaking laws and causing needless suffering to his world-full of Designated Enemies. He has destroyed our economy, our global alliances, our military readiness, and our influence for good in the world.
No one knows how the coming election will turn out. But everybody knows they must vote to restore justice, the rule of law, and every citizen’s right to vote. We know that administration loyalists in Congress and across federal agencies are regularly violating their Constitutional oaths, and doing their best to rig November state elections by illegally preventing voters from registering, voting at all, or having their votes count if they vote Democratic, especially in Red states, where Republican Fraud will be rampant.
Everything is at stake. The good news is that every day more and more citizens see what is at stake and committing to taking our country back for democracy. The bad news is that elections have been heavily gerrymandered in red states and further rigged to make blue votes disappear without getting counted.
We close today with yet another poignant lyric from Leonard Cohen…
And yes it’s come to this,
it’s come to this,
and wasn’t it a long way down…
wasn’t it a strange way down…?
lummi island wine tasting sept 11-12 ’26
This weekend open Friday & Saturday 4-6 pm
Maryhill’s Stonehenge
Friday Bread This Week
Sorry…our baker is away this week… 🙁
This week’s wine tasting
Riebeek Pinotage ’21 South Africa $14
Cold soaked overnight, fermented on the lees in 80% French and 20% American oak, and blended with unoaked wine to enhance fresh fruity flavors.
La Atalaya del Camino ’20 Spain $15
Intense aromas, fruit, and elegance on the nose with a distinct spiciness and a touch of floral notes. Rich and meaty structure, with rich dark fruits and hints of spice. Smooth and pleasant long finish.
Stoller Helen’s Pinot Noir ’19 Oregon $50; sale $30 !!
Elegant nose of heady floral, baking spice, and red fruit, notes of earth, and black raspberry; layered and vibrant palate carries red fruit flavors and a ferrous minerality through a long finish.
New Paintings by Anne Gibert
Last weekend we took down Anne’s paintings that have graced the wine shop since, we think, Covid.
In their place we have a wide range of newer ones of all sizes and subjects we think you will enjoy!
Economics of the Heart: What Everybody Knows
A classic tune by our old friend Leonard Cohen tells a story that fits our present moment with precision.
It begins like this:
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor and the rich get rich
That’s how it goes…and Everybody knows
The “mid-term election” is what is supposed to be happening in every state across our country in November. But Everybody knows that’s not what will be happening, because for the past two years our federal government has been staffed with people specifically chosen because they are committed to the complete destruction of our Constitutional Government.
Before our eyes the last two years have unfolded on a schedule and trajectory laid out in great detail in Project 2025, which is very clear on its commitment to creating an Authoritarian State where all power is wielded by a handful of multi-billionaires whose only truly remarkable characteristics seem to be a complete lack of any semblance of empathy, honor, loyalty, kindness, or fairness.
On the contrary, we have seen over and over in the ten exhausting years of 24/7 domination of public media by a stunningly small, hateful, lying, mean-spirited, and cruel white men committed to turning America into a Christian dystopia where all wealth and authority is in their hands, voting will disappear altogether; women will become completely subordinate to husbands they don’t get to choose; and people of color will be expelled or exterminated to make room for, you know, Jesus.
Almost certainly the coming election will be rigged, as it was in 2016, 2020, and 2024. The Tweetster gets 24/7 media coverage while he dozes, lies, plays golf, and punishes everyone because he can and because he loves their pain. And pretty much every Republican goes along with its inherent racism, meanness, and cruelty.
This has all become an active Civil War, already hurting broad communities of the most vulnerable among us, including school kids, immigrants, people of color, women, the poor, handicapped, or “different” in any way from White, Racist, Christian, and worth at least $hundreds of millions.
It is a terrible thing to feel this deep shame for what our country has become along with ongoing disgust, disappointment, and grief that such mean spirits should prevail.
So…we keep fighting for this 250 yr-old American Dream we old-timers have been blessed to live.
lummi island wine tasting sept 4-5 ’26
This weekend open Friday & Saturday 4-6 pm
Dawn full moon over Orcas Island and the Alaska ferry on its way home to Bellingham..
Friday Bread This Week
Jewish Sour Rye: A traditional rye bread made with a rye starter instead of wheat for traditional rye flavors, about half rye flour, malt syrup and caraway seeds. Brushed with a cornstarch glaze before and after baking to finish – 2/$5.
Toasted Pecan & Flax Seed – Also made with a rye starter which creates a different flavor profile. The final dough is made with bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat, toasted pecans, flax seeds, and honey, for a very flavorful bread!- $5/loaf
…and pastry this week:
Traditional Croissants – Made with a levain and prefermented “old dough” – where a portion of the flour, water, salt and yeast is fermented overnight. The final dough includes more flour, butter, milk and sugar, and laminated with more butter before being cut and shaped into traditional french croissants. — 2/$5
This week’s wine tasting
L’Amauve Le Rose d’Yvonne ’24 France $14
Pale salmon-pink; nose of red berry fruits and balsamic menthol notes and fresh, thirst-quenching, fruity attack flowing into zippy aromatics.
MAN Cabernet Sauvignon ’24 South Africa $14
Consistently appealing aromas and flavors of ripe plum, red currant, violets, Italian herbs and exotic spices; vibrant flavors of dark berries, spicy plum an lingering hints of orange peel.
Pascual Toso Reserve Malbec ’22 Argentina $21
Dry, full-bodied and richly layered with aromas and flavors of ripe blackberry, sous bois, and toasty oak, with firm, fine-grained tannins that go well with savory, rich. or spicy spicy dishes. A long-time local favorite!
Wine Shop Announcement
While we have no “official” date in mind, and while we have heartily enjoyed the community that has thrived around the wine shop for the last 20 years, Pat and I are feeling our age in many ways and are now working to clear our existing inventory over the next few months. No final closing date has been set, and we will continue the Friday tastings through the end of the year.
Alas, as I have lamented to many of you over the last several years, our little business, along with scores of wineries, distributors, and retailers around the country, have taken a huge hit in the last dozen years as fallout from the “Costco laws” passed here in Washington and other wine-producing states across the country, radically changing the rules for wine and liquor sales. Between the time Prohibition ended in 1933, every manufacturer and distributor of alcoholic beverages in the country was required to charge all wholesale buyers/resellers the same wholesale price for their products. Btw, those laws were the direct result of two long-fought antitrust cases against corporate giants A&P and Standard Oil.
Costco spent many $millions lobbying state legislatures around the country to repeal those rules, and they prevailed. As a result, because of the sheer volume of business it does, Costco gets enormous wholesale price discounts, paying substantially less per bottle from every producer and distributor, and retailing it for substantially less than the “wholesale” price the rest of us pay.
Many of our longtime distributors were starved out of business, stopped their periodic wine tastings for local retailers, and stopped sending reps to the Island to pour samples for us. That did away with a lot of the fun, travel, and learning we have so enjoyed from tasting wine around our region and other parts of the world of the last 20 years, and decreased our annual sales by about 60%.
New Paintings by Anne Gibert
Due largely to Covid, our walls have been blessed with the same collection of paintings from our neighbor and long-time friend Anne Gibert for several years! Back in the early days of the wine shop, she was sometimes our only visitor, and we have enjoyed many long and meandering conversations over many years. Our current plan is to put up more recent works before opening this week!
Economics of the Heart: Money Can’t Buy Them Love
One takeaway from this Costco zeitgeist is that the concentration of more and more wealth into fewer and fewer hands is one of many direct results from the last 40 years of Republican/Heritage political ambitions. Since Heritage got Reagan to end the FCC requirement that news broadcasts must represent all points of view on any topic, Fox News and ilk have been flooding the airwaves with baseless lies about a wide range of non-topics that have turned a substantial percentage of our population into mindless idiots.
At the present time, the wealthiest 1% of US households controls nearly a third (30.9%) of the nation’s wealth (as of 2024.) Of those, the top 0.1% holds about 13.9% of the total wealth. Curiously, none of these guys comes across as a particularly happy camper. Their money buys political actions in their favor monetarily, but it appears that the small handful of them already own something like 20% of Everything Everywhere, but don’t look or sound particularly “happy” about it.
What we can be sure of is that the government these guys think they have bought does not seem particularly interested or capable of making intelligent decisions about anything. The Tweetster’s war on Iran has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that the wanton firing of experienced and dedicated federal government employees, including senior military officers in key leadership positions, has severely damaged our nation’s strategic global options and long-time alliances with allies around the world, and pissed away the stockpile of munitions and the options they represent on tactically and strategically empty targets.
The following is offered as a bit of comic relief on the seriousness of our predicament…
lummi island wine tasting Aug 28-29 ’26
This week open Friday & Saturday 4-6 pm
lunar reflections…
Friday Bread This Week
Seeded Country Hearth- Made with a mix of bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat with pumpkin, sunflower and poppy seeds for a nice rustic bread!- $5/loaf
Cinnamon Raisin – Starts with a poolish of bread and fresh milled rye flour fermented overnight with bread flour and freshly milled whole wheat and rolled oats, some honey for sweetness, a little milk for a tender crumb, lots of raisins, and a healthy dose of cinnamon…a hearty rustic loaf, great for breakfast toast or nice French toast – $5/loaf
…and pastry this week:
Individual Cinnamon Rolls – Made with a rich, sweet roll dough of eggs, butter and sugar, rolled out and spread with pastry cream, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, rolled up, and sliced into individual rolls for baking. – 2/$5.
This week’s wine tasting
Chapoutier Belleruche Blanc ’23 France $14
Delicious blend of grenache blanc and roussanne; fragrant and perfumed with a light, grilled-lemon note over ripe melon, and a lingering palate of rich white peach.
Wolftrap Red ’24 South Africa $14
Consistently appealing aromas and flavors of ripe plum, red currant, violets, Italian herbs and exotic spices; vibrant flavors of dark berries, spicy plum an lingering hints of orange peel.
MAN Vintners Pinotage ’23 South Africa $14
Aromas of dark coffee beans, red berries, nutmeg, and vanilla spice turning to dark berries and smoky plum; rustic yet silky and juicy, with smooth tannins, balanced acidity, and comforting intensity.
Economics of the Heart: Lessons from Beziers
Albigensian crusade, Beziers, FR 1209 courtesy bookofworldhistory.com
Across World history, religions have played pivotal roles in creating division, hatred, brutality, murder, and torture by allowing only one religion to exist at all. The history of the Catholic church is rife with crucifixions, burnings at the stake, drowning of so-called witches, and other horrors.
One enduring example is the 1209 massacre at Beziers in France, where a religious sect called the Cathars had many followers, but there are many complex and unresolvable questions about what they really believed, from ancient Gnostic teachings (which have interesting associations with the historical Jesus), to the unfounded accusations of the dominant Catholic Papal political stance against them.
The bottom line is that mixing politics and religion is an ancient and well-worn path for power-hungry coalitions across human history to establish and maintain a constant flow of unfounded accusations, cruelty, and plain Lies to justify and maintain their political dominance. As the old saying goes, “when Fascism comes to America, it will be draped in the Flag and carrying a cross.”
This is exactly what has been going in the in the Republican Party since the Heritage Foundation made Ronald Reagan their very own pro-billionaire, morally ignorant puppet and set the wheels in motion that have brought us to the current Global Crisis, where Maga Republicans, in consolidation with Fundamentalist- White-Male-Christian sects, have completely abandoned the United States Constitution and are no doubt getting set to do away with Congress and elections altogether. Meanwhile they are actively and most cruelly terrorizing, exterminating, deporting, and ‘disappearing’ people of color, particularly migrants trying to escape the brutality of their countries of origin. The Tweetster and his Cabinet of grovelers have tossed aside our long-time global alliances and won the disdain of our former allies in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. We murder unidentified people in boats with bombs and rockets with completely undocumented assertions that they were all ‘drug smugglers’ who “deserved to die.” From any angle that is outright murder, and counter to every international agreement and human sensibility.
Meanwhile the Tweetster courts favor with our traditional adversaries across the world, $haring with them our most advanced weapons systems while at the same time hollowing out our own military by replacing the best and brightest who have traditionally risen through the ranks to the top leadership spots with incompetent yes-men anxious to follow the Tweetster’s orders, however extravagant, ill-planned, and counter-productive they always prove to be.
The coming November election in barely two months is possibly the most consequential in our nation’s history. Project 2025 has already taken our blessed United States far from the founding principles that set a global example for democracy, fairness, inclusion, and equal protection in law and which we must all fight to bring back. Every one of us must do everything we can to preserve election integrity, take Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, and support the mountains of litigation challenging MAGA overreach of every stripe.
There are many signs that the public tide is turning as more and more Americans turn against Maga every day. We have two months left to fight, donate, bombard those in power with mail and calls, and together, take control of Congress and begin the hard work of Really Making America Great Again!
2072 Granger Way