lummi island wine tasting april 19-20 ’24
Hours, April 5-6 ’24
Friday 4-6 pm Saturday 3-5 pm
daisies at Bayview
This week’s wine tasting
Juggernaut Chardonnay ’21 Sonoma $17
Aromas of apple, Asian pear and lemon meringue open to rich and lingering flavors of stone fruit, honeysuckle, and yellow plum, and barrel fermentation finishes with notes of vanilla, butter cream and hints of clove.
Marietta Old Vine Red ’22 California
Zinfandel blend from Geyserville with lovely bright plum fruit, dark and focused notes of briar and black tea, with balanced flavor, medium body, and easy mouth of sweet spice and velvety tannins; you will want more!
Bold Wine Cabernet ’21 $26 Paso Robles
Co-fermented cab-malbec-petit verdot; carefully hand-harvested, sorted, and destemmed, 6-day cold-soaked, and native yeast fermented in stainless, followed by extended maceration for big flavors & lingering palate.
Friday Bread This Week
Rosemary Olive Oil – Made with bread flour and freshly milled white whole wheat for additional flavor and texture. Fresh rosemary from the garden and olive oil to make for a nice tender crumb and a nice crisp crust. A great all around bread – $5/loaf
Sesame Semolina – this bread uses a sponge as a pre-ferment that ferments some of the flour, water & yeast before mixing the final dough. Made with semolina and bread flour as well as a soaker of cornmeal, millet and sesame seeds, a little olive oil rounds out the flavor and tenderizes the crumb. The finished dough is rolled in more sesame seeds before baking. A bread with a lot of great flavors. $5/loaf
Kouign Aman – Made with the same traditional laminated french pastry used for croissants for both a little sourdough flavor and build strength…hen rolling out however, instead of using flour to prevent sticking, sugar is used. The dough is cut into squares, placed in cupcake tins then filled with a cream cheese filling…sort of “ a cheese Danish and a Croissant walk into a bar…”– 2/$5
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday Janice emails the week’s bread offering to her mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday will be available for pickup at the wine shop each Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. Go to Contact us to get on the bread email list.
Economics of the Heart: Freedom and Constraint
“WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.” by quotableright is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Eisenhower was the President we old-timers grew up with, and to us kids the fifties felt pretty stable, peaceful, and “safe.” Despite nagging concerns about surprise nuclear attacks from the Russians, the “duck and cover” drills in school, and the little pamphlets to help us differentiate the silhouettes of Russian bombers from our own, we were imbued with the notion that we were the Good Guys, and “they” were the Bad Guys.
That bubble burst when JFK was murdered in 1963, and there is considerable reason to suspect it –and perhaps Bobby’s– assassinations were in retaliation for their ending the long history of racial segregation in the South.
LBJ then famously ushered in his own kind of New Deal at the same time as he escalated our involvement in Vietnam. (I remember marching past his smiles and waves as our contingent of midshipmen marched past his reviewing stand at his Inaugural Parade; and I also remember the bleak devastation along the Mekong when our ship went up it in ’68. Complicated stuff.)
Nixon managed to do a number of good things and not-so-good things. (I remember a fleeting hand squeeze and smile when Air Force 1 landed briefly at NAS Quonset Pt RI where I was stationed. He had promised to End the War and didn’t.)
That reminds me that I had a close friend at that time who was a Big Fan of William Buckley, and we had some spirited discussions watching his show, Firing Line. While Buckley’s personality was pompous and irritating, he was entertaining in his way. He is mentioned here because his views marked a particular point in the development of American Conservative values and thought, combining elements of libertarianism, anticommunism, and Catholic traditionalism.
Today’s conservative values are shadow silhouettes of those days. We can start to recognize a certain cognitive dissonance between what our legitimate news outlets tell us abut our reality and how well-funded, politically motivated “information manipulators” reframe it for particular political ends. Libertarians and anticommunists have far more in common with today’s Democrats, and even a lot of Catholic women these days are not happy with the war on women’s rights.
Our current national polities highlight the downward spiral of our “little-d” democratic values over the past four decades. As often noted in these posts, this deliberate undermining of democratic values is a thread that runs a least back to business grievance against the New Deal.
By 1980 the those same forces had built a marriage of Birchism, Big Money, and a host of very influential “think tanks” like the Heritage Foundation, powerful enough to get Reagan into the White House, consolidate control of the Republican Party, and work toward their ultimate political goals of winning and keeping complete control of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial arms of both the Federal government and every State government. They have been very ambitious, well-funded, and ruthless. And, unfortunately for all living things, very successful.
The central question of our times is, as Butch and Sundance kept wondering, “Who ARE those guys?”
At present we can infer that they are big enough, wealthy enough, powerful enough, apolitical enough, self-centered enough, and ruthless enough for us to infer that their mission:
- has a lot more to do with money and power than with religion;
- is funded by a significant number of billionaires and corporations across the globe;
- is politically and financially linked across nations and industries;
- aims to achieve global, political, economic, and financial dominance by a small planetary elite;
- sees climate change as both a reason and an opportunity to eliminate poverty and dissidence by eliminating a large percentage of humanity. It’s just business.
The Tweetster is a decoy, a dry run, a preliminary experiment. And totally expendable. They have planned for scenarios where he runs and wins and is again their puppet (even if he doesn’t know it), ones where loses or goes to jail (yes, there is likely a detailed contingency plan for the next coup), and every other scenario imaginable.
So: the Tweetster has only ever been right about one thing: we better fight like hell or we won’t have a country any more.
lummi island wine tasting april 12-13 ’24
Hours, April 12-13 ’24
Friday 4-6 pm Saturday 3-5 pm
mama and maturing eaglets
This week’s wine tasting
Juggernaut Sauvignon Blanc $17 New Zealand $17
Marlborough’s Wairau Valley has a global reputation for its bright, vibrant acidity and aromas of fresh-cut grass and
gooseberry and citric notes of zesty grapefruit, lemon, and passion fruit that carry through the elegant finish.
Masseria del Feudo Nero d’Avola Sicilia ’21 Italy $19
Cherry, plum, vanilla and toast highlight a smooth, well-balanced wine with easy flavor, soft tannins, and silky consistency, pairing beautifully with stewed meats or pork dishes, (or pretty much anything edible!)
Alexander Valley Vineyards Zinfandel ’19 California $19
Dark purple/red hue; spicy, earthy aromas of black cherry, pepper, plum, raspberry and citrus; rich earthy flavors of cherry, plum, boysenberry, black pepper, cranberry, apricot and a hint of chocolate…everything a California zin is supposed to be.
Friday Bread This Week
Poolish Ale – the preferment here is a poolish, made with bread flour, a bit of yeast and a nice ale beer for the liquid and fermented overnight. Mixed the next day with bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat. This makes a great all around bread with a nice crisp crust – $5/loaf
Buckwheat Walnut & Honey – also made with a poolish of fresh milled buckwheat and bread flours. Buckwheat is not a grain it is actually a seed and closer in the plant family to rhubarb and sorrel than to wheat and contains no gluten– (**note: contains wheat flour so NOT gluten free). Buckwheat has an earthy/nutty flavor, a little honey and toasted walnuts. – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Chocolate Muffins – Rich and delicious, great chocolate flavor, and a seductively moist texture: flour, brown sugar, sour cream, and eggs, with lotsa chocolate chips inside and sprinkled on top–2/$5
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday Janice emails the week’s bread offering to her mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday will be available for pickup at the wine shop each Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. Go to Contact us to get on the bread email list.
Wine of the Week: Alexander Valley Vineyards Zinfandel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Valley_AVA
Alexander Valley is a lovely wine region north of Santa Rosa and Napa Valley. Is is also the largest and most fully planted wine region in Sonoma County. Its many vineyards have a long-established reputation for high quality cab and merlot, which consistently deliver great flavor and texture from the alluvial soils and the hot days and cool nights that bless the entire Sonoma region. Zinfandel and Chardonnay also thrive in the region.
It is also a beautiful place just to drive through, soothed by its lush, intensely green and voluptuous vineyards. This area, east of Healdsburg and the Russian River which flows through the Valley, always seems many miles away from the hubbub of traffic just a few miles to the west.
But of course everyone already knows that vineyards themselves are soothing. Maybe it’s the constant care that keeps them healthy and thriving. Do vineyards just happen to be in beautiful places, or is it the vineyards that make these places beautiful…?
Economics of the Heart: Women to the Rescue
pink hats from the 2017 Inauguration protests
A recurring theme in this blog has been the inseparable relationship between values and facts. It’s not just that we like or prefer certain things. it’s that we make meaning from our experience based on our values, both consciously and unconsciously. Some people come into the wine shop and say “I don’t like chardonnay,” or “Red wines give me a headache.” Others might say, “I’m here to taste, whatcha pouring today?”
We all operate in a decision framework of our own personal construction, built from our experiences and the meanings we have made from them. We take it for granted that our beliefs about wine and art and beauty and politics are rational, consistent, and correct. Therefore it is not surprising that our personal values are not universal. Ten of us can share an experience and we can all make different meanings from it based on our unconscious values. This is why we have political divisions. I value a healthy planet. You prefer more $ in your pocket.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in today’s politics. It is no longer a simple ritual of “my idea is better than your idea (nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah) followed by negotiation, discussion, listening, learning, and compromising. Since about 1988, American politics has been turned into an ongoing war between our two dominant political parties, and compromise has become not only vanishingly rare, but also met with disdain, simian posturing, and fiddling faster and louder as the flames get higher and hotter.
Everybody knows at some level that this crap has to stop. The world is teetering on the abyss of an Earth-swallowing whirlpool of human making, and the brats who have taken over the toy box have climbed up into their little clubhouse to dance their little “victory” in stopping the business of government in its tracks. Meanwhile, the world teeters between the accelerating climate crisis and the growing menace of authoritarian rule everywhere, including here. As everybody knows.
At the moment there seems to be only one brightening ray of hope for pulling our country, our planet, and our world out of this global death spiral: Our Women!
There are a lot of moving parts in this picture, but the one force that has been gaining some traction in opposition to this authoritarian implosion is the rebellion against forced birth triggered by the red-state-forced-birth bandwagon. Numerous states have already passed legislation to restore every woman’s right to choose, and others will follow.
Picture OBI-WAN Kenobi saying: “Help us, Princess Leia…you’re our only Hope!”
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lummi island wine tasting april 5-6 ’24
Hours, April 5-6 ’24
Friday 4-6 pm Saturday 3-5 pm
a sunrise we can actually see…!
This week’s wine tasting
MAN Chenin Blanc ’21 South Africa $11
Using only free-run juice preserves a clean, natural character, refreshing acidity, light, bright flavors of quince, pear, and pineapple, with palate of fresh stonefruit and apple, refreshing acidity & minerality, and a round, soothing mouthfeel.
Sanguineti Morellino de Scansano ’21 Italy $14
Soil of river stones, quartz, sea shells; flavors of sun-ripened, slightly smoky fruit, fresh cracked pepper, sage, and ocean brine; taut structure and a long, slightly smoky finish.
Garzon Petit Clos Marselan ’19 Uruguay
Intense red color with carmine reflections; elegant nose of red and black fruits with finish of eucalyptus and mint; Palate of integrated tannins, mineral and subtly saline notes that reflect its exceptional terroir.
Friday Bread This Week
Rosemary Olive Oil – Made with bread flour and freshly milled white whole wheat for additional flavor and texture. Fresh rosemary from the garden and olive oil to make for a nice tender crumb and a nice crisp crust. A great all around bread – $5/loaf
Multi Grain- – Uses a preferment of a portion of the flour, water, salt & yeast, mixed and fermented overnight before mixing the final dough. This allows a portion of the dough to begin the enzymatic activity and gluten development overnight in a cool environment. The next day it is mixed with bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat and rye, then some oatmeal, flax, sunflower and sesame seeds are added for a nice bit of crunch and some extra flavor. – $5/loaf
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday Janice emails the week’s bread offering to her mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday will be available for pickup at the wine shop each Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. Go to Contact us to get on the bread email list.
Wine of the Week: Garzon Petit Clos Marselan ’19 Uruguay $17
At the southern-most point on the Uruguayan Atlantic coast and 160 meters above sea level, these Marselan vines were planted in a unique geographical landscape with a temperate climate. Using organic farming practices allows each vineyard to reflect the authentic personality of its unique location.
Geology in coastal Uruguay belongs to what is known as Crystalline Basement, the oldest soils on the planet, over 2 billion years old. Over millennia these rocks are altered and broken down by geological forces,developing a fantastic soil of weathered rock called Ballast.
Since all the wines we have tasted from this winery have substantially over-delivered for their modest prices, we are persuaded that there is indeed something special going on in these vines’ local geology, geography, and climate…you know, the terroir…that is very wine-friendly!
As for Marselan, it was created in 1961 as a cross between Bordeaux varietal cab sauv and Rhone varietal grenache. Because of its small grape sizes, it was not grown for some years, until, because of its resistance to many vine disease organisms, it found homes in a few vineyards in France, California, and Uruguay.
Economics of the Heart: Time for a Course Change
creative commons
“All I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets.”
“I had some beautiful pictures taken in which I had a big smile on my face. I looked happy, I looked content, I looked like a very nice person, which in theory I am.”
“Right now, a number of state laws allow a baby to be born from his or her mother’s womb in the ninth month. It is wrong. It has to change.”
“I’m the most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far. Nobody’s ever been more successful than me. I’m the most successful person ever to run. Ross Perot isn’t successful like me. Romney – I have a Gucci store that’s worth more than Romney.”
“Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest – and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.”
“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute; is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside…?”
“We have Stealth bombers that are completely invisible. You can be standing right next to one, and you can’t see it at all.”
“You know what uranium is, right? It’s this thing called nuclear weapons, and other things; like lots of things are done with uranium, including bad things.”
“Canadians are smuggling things back into Canada because the tariffs are so massive…so high that they have to smuggle them in. They buy shoes, then they wear them. They scuff them up. They make them sound old or look old.”
“A virus like the Corona virus hasn’t been seen since the 1917 flu that ended WWII.”
“In June of 1775, the Continental Congress created a unified army out of the revolutionary forces encamped around Boston and New York and named it after the great George Washington, commander-in-chief. Our army manned the air. It rammed the ramparts. It took over the airports. It did everything it had to do. And at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory. And when dawn came, their star-spangled banner waved defiant.”
“26,000 unreported sexual assaults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?”
“All of the women on ‘The Apprentice’ flirted with me- consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.”
“I think I am actually humble. I think I am much more humble than you would understand.”
“Pence did something wrong. He should have put the votes back to the state legislatures. I think we would have had a different outcome, I really do.”
“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the pussy, you can do anything.”
to Zelensky: “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. She (US ambassador Yovanovitch) is going to go through some things. I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it.”
- “I cannot tell a lie.” -George Washington
- “I cannot tell the truth.” -Donald Trump
- “I cannot tell the difference.” -Trump voter
lummi island wine tasting march 29-30 ’24
Hours this week…
Friday 4-6 pm Saturday 3-5 pm
more signs of Spring…ahhhh
This week’s wine tasting
We are trying something new this weekend that we hope will be fun and interesting: six wines we are sampling from Cinder Winery in Idaho. This came about after new friend of the wine shop Tom B, a club member there, shared some recent arrivals with us and everyone found them tasty! The winery sent us one each of six different wines, so we will pour three on Friday and 3 on Saturday:
Friday:
Cinder Dry Viognier ’22 Aromas of lemon gelato and jasmine, vibrant citrus, enduring fruity finish, and well-rounded structure.
Cinder Malbec ’20 Notes of white tea and bing cherry, robust red fruit flavors w/hints of leather, juniper, cranberry and cinnamon.
Cinder Syrah ’22 Boysenberry and vanilla aromas, palate of toasted peppercorn, fresh blackberries, silky finish w/hints of molasses and smoked meats.
Saturday:
- Cinder Rosé of Cinsault ’22 Delicately nuanced color with floral, citrus, and honeydew melon aromas; light palate of red fruit, lemon balm notes & crisp finish.
- Cinder Valentina ’21 Cab, Merlot, Malbec; Aromas and flavors of bing cherry, espresso bean, vanilla, & thyme; medium bodied with a smooth, rich texture.
- Cinder Rowen ’21 Syrah, Mourvedre, Cinsault blend; Aromas and flavors of sour cherry, tart plum, crushed herbs & tobacco, with bright, long finish.
Friday Bread This Week
Italian Breakfast Bread – A sweetly delicious bread! Made with bread flour, eggs, yogurt, a little sugar and vanilla, with dried cranberries, golden raisins, and candied lemon peel. Perfect for breakfast toast or how about some Easter morning French Toast!? – $5/loaf
Colomba di Pasqua (aka ‘Easter Dove’): A traditional Italian Easter cake similar to Christmas panettone. Made with a sweet Italian levain, known as a lievito madre, kept at a warm temperature for a sweet, cake-like dough rather than a sour one. Contains plenty of eggs, sugar and butter plus fresh and candied orange peel, topped with a crunchy almond/hazelnut glaze and pearl sugar before baking in a dove-shaped baking form as labor of love Easter dove! – $10/loaf
Hot Cross Buns – Uses an enriched dough with plenty of butter, sugar and eggs, with lots of of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger, balancing plenty of currants, and candied lemon, and orange peel, and topped with a flavorful paste. 2/$5
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday Janice emails the week’s bread offering to her mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday will be available for pickup at the wine shop each Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. Go to Contact us to get on the bread email list.
Economics of the Heart: Taking Bearings
Dorothea Lange: Children of Oklahoma drought refugee in migratory camp in California, 1936
Right here, right now, across our country and around the world, the combination of an ever-expanding global population and the accelerating infrastructure destruction from floods, fires, famines, and wars overlapping across the planet from climate change is creating costs faster and larger than human civilization seems willing to recognize and address. Things are falling apart faster and on such an accelerating global scale that our collective abilities, will, intelligence, and commitment seem increasingly unlikely to save either ourselves or our planet from annihilation of our own making.
Here we are in 2024, after some Five Decades of concurring research findings about the existential threat posed by global warming, and still we are being stonewalled by deliberate long-term corporate denial (“Greenwashing is our most important product!”), and not until very recently has a significant proportion of our population been waking up to the magnitude and immediacy of these massive, overlapping, and interlinked existential threats.
It should not be lost on anyone that right here in our own country, for the last fifty years one entire political party has based its entire “platform” on being avidly in favor of anything that increased short-term corporate profits, executive salaries, and stock prices, and equally against taxing big business or the billionaire owners and executives who own them, and at the same time increasing taxes and decreasing benefits for a struggling middle class and the perennially poor. This “Robber Baron” philosophy goes back to the Industrial Revolution in England, where an old cartoon of two top-hatted gentlemen on an evening stroll along dirty streets bordering giant industrial smokestacks agreed, “There is a Great Deal of Money to be made here.”
These attitudes have been the essential Republican platform since at least 1970: “rob the poor to help the rich.” Well, the good news is that that Republican party no longer seems to exist, having now morphed into two related entities. The first and most obvious is the Tweetster’s Maga party of suckers who still think he gives a fig about them or their problems.
The second seems to have been the even more dangerous driving force behind the Tweetster’s original candidacy and its likely “steal” of the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. It by far the more dangerous, the shadowed Overlord of the Tweetster and his flunkies, a massively well-funded marriage of corporatists, fascists, and religious fundamentalists. They are not the Tweetster’s pawn; it’s the other way around, and he has no idea.
It is their platform the Tweetster has been openly touting, including doing away with the Constitution, freedom of religion, women’s rights, and environmental protections. On an international scale it seems inclined toward global domination by a strange dystopian melange of corporate hierarchy, Christian fundamentalism, and authoritarian control of everyone and everything. It would not only dismantle the United States. It would do away with “countries” altogether by making them individual Industrial Departments with their own Board-chosen Chairs– a unified global industrial network that makes its own rules for its own aims for its own reasons. And completely without mercy.
This kind of fantasy organization was at the center of the 1975 sci-fi fantasy film Rollerball, starring James Caan and John Houseman. This little chat between global hero Caan and one of a small elite of global industrial executives Houseman is one version of what we are talking about. These people may not be so much “pro-Putin” as they are some new kind of authoritarian organization in which the “workers” are completely expendable and the only goal is the maximization of profit and personal power for a very small elite.
In such a possible world (and many others), there is likely no concern at all about climate change. Its disasters, famines, wars, and destruction will cause billions of people to die in local battles for scraps, from starvation, thirst, or exposure; or simply because there is no profit in their existence. The Executives will inherit the Earth, or what’s left of it.
It’s not personal. It’s just, you know, business.
2072 Granger Way