lummi island wine tasting apr 2 ’21
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Bread This Week
Italian Breakfast Bread – A delicious and sweet (but not too sweet!) bread of flour, eggs, yogurt, a little sugar and vanilla as well as dried cranberries golden raisins and candied lemon peel. Perfect for breakfast toast or even better for French Toast – $5/loaf
Colomba di Pasqua (“Easter Dove”) – A traditional Italian Easter bread similar to Christmas panettone. Made with a sweet italian levain as well as flour and plenty eggs, sugar, honey and butter plus vanilla bean and candied orange peel. Topped with a crunchy almond and hazelnut glaze and pearl sugar before baking in a dove-shaped baking form as a symbol of the Easter dove. $5/loaf
Hot Cross Buns – an enriched dough made with plenty of butter, sugar and eggs. Full of spices, including cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger, as well as plenty of currants, and candied lemon and orange peel. Topped with a flavorful paste and glazed these are a delicious treat to celebrate spring. 2/$5
Wine of the Week: Montinore Borealis
Montinore Estate is located in Oregon just east of Portland. It is one of the largest producers of both certified biodynamic and organic viticululture in the country. Grapes are grown on their 200-acre Organic vineyard where the focus is on producing superior Pinot Noirs, cool climate whites, and fascinating Italian varietals.
Owner Rudy Marchesi learned winemaking from his Italian immigrant parents while growing up in the northeastern U. S. He first heard about biodynamics while at Findhorn in Scotland in the 70’s, and took a year-long course in the method, which he started applying to the Montinore vineyards around 2003. Read more
Biodynamic farming practices were first developed and promoted by Rudolf Steiner about 100 years ago. His ideas were based on “a recognition that the whole earth is a single, self-regulating, multi-dimensional ecosystem.” Biodynamic farming treats soil fertility, plant growth, and livestock care as ecologically interrelated tasks. When visiting wineries it Europe, we have found that many grower-winemakers use some subset of biodynamic practices, the most common being to schedule bottling by the phase of the moon.
Montinore Borealis White NV Oregon $15
An ongoing inter-vintage blend of cool-climate German varietals Müller-Thurgau (35%), Gewürztraminer (29%), Riesling (24%) and Pinot Gris (12%). Each year’s version consistently blends the unique qualities of each varietal into a wine with heady scents of orange blossom, ripe honeydew, guava and kiwi, and a vibrant palate that is sumptuous and round, bursting with stone fruit, Meyer lemon and juicy pear that yield to a clean, bright, and uplifting finish.
Partial Reopening April 16 !!
Current CDC guidelines permit gatherings of fully vaccinated people without masks, but continue to restrict gatherings among those who have not been vaccinated, especially if they have higher risk for Covid complications.
Since many of our members have now completed their vaccine protocols, we are currently planning a partial reopening the weekend of April 16-17, and limited to individuals who have completed an approved vaccine protocol. We plan to be open both days from 4-6 pm.
A wine tasting selection of four wines will be available for $5. We are all pretty rusty and maybe a little nervous about being too close to others after all these months of avoiding contact, so we’ll try it out and see how it goes. Feels weird even to think about it!
The Economics of the Heart
The dominant story in the news this week has been the trial of the Minneapolis policeman who killed George Floyd. Whatever the outcome of the trial, what happened that day will remain infamous in the public consciousness for a very long time, partially because the entire world saw the video of the murder the day it occurred, and many more times since. Since the dawn of cell phone cameras, the world has seen large numbers of American police officers over-react and kill people over what turned out to be simple misunderstandings.
One of the most powerful testimonies came from Donald Williams, one of the witnesses to the event, who can be heard pleading, with increasing passion, for the officer to release the deadly pressure on Floyd’s neck. When the defense attorney tried to characterize William’s passion as “anger,” Williams discounted that interpretation by saying simply, “I stayed in my body.” William trained for many years in mixed martial arts, and developed the ability to stay present in a confrontation. He demonstrated the same discipline in court in his reply to the defense attorney: “No, my words weren’t getting angrier that awful day in May…they grew more and more pleading — for life.”
This story spotlights the importance of training and self-discipline under duress. In the replays of the ever-increasing number of homicides perpetrated by police officers across America in what should have been routine and courteous stops, we have often noted the increasing tension in their voices, the shallowness of breath, and the higher pitch of voice that betray that they are NOT staying present in their bodies. And without this essential anchor, they become anxious and ungrounded, and inevitably make the situation worse. People who cannot develop these skills are not qualified to be placed in such demanding positions.
Whatever the particular outcome of this trial, the big takeaway is that police training should include the same compartmentalizing mental discipline as the martial arts that allows us to stay present in our bodies. Indeed, there are many testimonials of famous martial arts teachers of defusing real-life confrontations by responding with open compassion instead of defensive hostility.
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2072 Granger Way