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…
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
2072 Granger Way