lummi island wine tasting april 11-12 ’25
Wine Tasting Friday & Saturday April 11-12 ’25 4-6 pm
SPRING SCHEDULE BEGINS…!
The current plan is to be open Fridays AND Saturdays from 4-6 !
cherry blossom time…!
Friday Bread Pickup This Week
Pain au Levain – Made with a nice mix of bread flour and freshly milled whole wheat and rye flours. After building the sourdough and mixing the final dough it gets a long cool overnight ferment in the refrigerator. This really allows the flavor to develop in this bread. A great all around bread – $5/loaf
Cinnamon Raisin – Made with a poolish of bread and fresh milled rye flour fermented overnight before mixing with bread flour, freshly milled whole wheat, rolled oats. Some honey for sweetness, a little milk for a tender crumb and loaded with raisins and a healthy dose of cinnamon for a hearty rustic loaf. – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Cinnamon Rolls! – These are made with a rich sweet roll dough full of eggs, butter and sugar. The dough is rolled out, spread with pastry cream, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, rolled up and sliced into rolls for baking. – 2/$5
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday the Bakery emails the week’s bread offering to the mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday (and not already claimed!) will be available for pickup at the wine shop each Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. Contact us at least two weeks before your visit to get on the bread list!
This week’s $10 Wine Tasting
Garzon Single Vineyard Albarino ’20 Uruguay $34 Elegant pale yellow in color; fresh and vibrant nose of tropical fruit with a chorus of subtle citrus and floral notes leads to a round, fresh, lingering palate with a saline minerality and a marked sense of terroir.
Can Blau Can Blau ’20 Spain $16 From the lovely Montsant wine region an hour SW of Barcelona, this long-time favorite calms the soul with aromas and flavors of cocoa bean, ripe dark fruits and berries, a seamless texture, and long, silky finish that improves with aeration.
Jacob Williams Sadie Red Blend NV Washington $28 Named for beloved longtime winery dog Sadie, this is a special blend of Cabernet Sauv, Merlot, Syrah and Cab Franc. Medium body, broad selection of red fruits, cedar, cassis , and savory herbs; multi-faceted and easy to enjoy for its primary fruit, herbal complexity, chocolaty tannins, and clean finish.
Celler Can Blau
(This piece was first posted in 2017 after a great wine trip in Spain…)
We have been buying and enjoying wines from Celler Can Blau for many years now, as they set a high standard for great wines at very reasonable prices. So, when we visited Spain a few years ago, tracking down the Can Blau winery for a visit was something of a priority. And since we were spending a week in the Montsant wine region where the grapes are grown, we expended some effort in tracking it down. As it turned out, it wasn’t that easy, and we stumbled upon it quite by accident while visiting a wine Cooperativa not far from our lodging in Capcanes called Mas Roig. (“mahss roych”)
It turned out that the Can Blau Main Offices are located elsewhere in Spain, but in order to market the wines as from the Denominacion of Montsant, it is not enough that the grapes are grown in Montsant– no, no, no, Senor-– the wine must also be made in Montsant! And guess what, the Can Blau wines were made in the very winery we were visiting, i.e., Mas Roig, which we discovered when the winemaker (Nuria Sarroca), imminently with child as I recall, breezed past us to check something in her part of the winery. Btw, we have found consistently over many years that this wine continues to improve for several days after opening…!
Economics of the Heart:
Only a few months ago the United States economy was the envy of the world. Despite the multi-year global recession from Covid 19 lockdowns and the mid-2020 stock market crash across the developed world, Joe Biden’s decades of experience in government and commitment to the American people kept our economy growing and improving. It will be remembered by history as a remarkable achievement.
Over the last two months, the Outlaw administration installed by Project 2025 has put idiots in charge of key government agencies, fired tens of thousands of highly experienced federal workers for no reason but malice, broken our 75-yr alliances with allies and neighbors, abandoned increasingly effective policies to curb global warming, and imposed huge tariffs on goods imported from every country in the world, raising their prices here by at least as much as those new tariffs.
At every level, from household to community to city, county, state, nation, region, and globe, every economy behaves more like a giant flock of starlings than like any machine. At any moment the wind can change, a predator can appear, or this or that part of the bird-cloud can suddenly swerve in an entirely different direction.
The global economy is like a giant table where every person on Earth brings a stock of skills, assets, and constant needs for food, clothing, shelter, and community. Everyone is constantly engaged in a repetitive cycle of working, buying, selling, and “living,” doing their best to get by every day in a community setting that is safe, supportive, and engaging.
These market relationships have an ancient history of community markets where trading has traditionally taken place. Some markets are still bartered, but most have used currency or credit cards as a means of exchange for millennia. As social animals every human individual, household, or community constantly interacts as a producer, buyer, and seller. All of these interactions are part of a global market driven by individual self-interest and budget constraints.
All of this has been going on for a very long time. However, as we have mentioned recently, CEO’s of large companies have long been engaged with maintaining market value of their company stock by building a reputation for quality, reliability, and service. In recent decades however, CEO’s of major firms have shifted their focus to maximizing not their company reputation, but their stock’s market price, at the expense of product and service quality. As in the Boeing case, or the growing history of hostile corporate takeovers, today’s business leaders are experiencetaking over any valuable enterprise and mining it for every penny before shutting it down and moving on to the next.
Except in this case, it is Our Country that is being taken over, looted, pumped dry, and impoverished at every level.
Which leads us to the present moment in United States history where the federal government has been taken over not by warfare, but by a “hostile takeover” by a coalition of billionaires intent on looting it of everything of value for their own personal wealth. These guys are already the richest .1% in the world…what can they possibly gain from removing the United States from its post-WWII central position of global leadership and cooperative alliances?
It seems a virtual certainty that our national secrets have been sold to or otherwise compromised by our internal national enemies to our external national enemies, opening the door for players like Hamas, Iran, the Saudis, the Taliban, and more to soon have nuclear capabilities and willing suicide bombers.
To close on a more positive note, it does appear at this particular moment that the Tweetster’s increasingly lunatic Idiocies of the Tariffs, the Allies, Doge, and the crashing Stock Market may perhaps be attracting enough billionaire attention to make some difference. At the same time, since last Saturday’s nationwide rallies, we have seen many communities across the nation mobilizing long-term determination to save our democracy.
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