lummi island wine tasting aug 11-12 ’23
Hours this weekend: Friday & Saturday, August 11-12, 4-6 pm
stork nest outside our window in Haro, Spain, 2013
This week’s wine tasting:
Maryhill Viognier Washington $14
Carefully picked and slowly pressed to extract vibrant aromas of melon, pear, and apricot with traces of pineapple and grapefruit, continuing into a sensational and crisp fruit finish.
Chateau Cabirau Cotes de Rousillon ’19 $17
The backbone of the Syrah and Carignan ally perfectly with the opulent Grenache, giving a medium-bodied wine of intense black fruit flavors, redolent of mountain herbs.
Muga Anden Estacion Rioja Crianza ’19 Spain $21
Tempranillo/Garnacha blend matured in French and European barrels for 14 months, making for a floral, juicy, open and approachable rioja. read more
Friday Bread Pickup This Week
Pain Meunier -aka “Miller’s Bread”— made with pre-fermented dough it contains all portions of the wheat berry: flour, fresh milled whole wheat, cracked wheat and wheat germ, always a favorite and a great all around bread. It makes the best toast! – $5/loaf
Sonnenblumenbrot – aka Sunflower Seed Bread– made with a pre-ferment that is a complete dough itself. It takes a portion of the flour, water, salt and yeast that ferments overnight before mixing the final dough, made with bread flour and freshly milled rye, then loaded up with toasted sunflower seeds and some barley malt syrup for sweetness. This is a typical German seed bread – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Black Sesame & Candied Lemon Brioche: A delicious brioche dough full of eggs, butter and sugar. Filled with fresh lemon zest and candied lemon and as if that weren’t enough, topped with a black sesame streusel before baking. Ooh la la, what’s not to like…–? 2/$5
To get on the bread order list, click the “Contact Us” link above and fill out the form. Each week’s bread menu is sent to the list each Sunday, for ordering by Tuesday, for pickup on Friday. Simple, right..? If you will be visiting the island and would like to order bread for your visit, at least a week’s notice is recommended for pickup the following Friday.
Wine of the Week: Muga El Andén de la Estación Crianza ’19 Spain $21
same stork nest in Haro
Pied de cuve is a technique used by winemakers to develop a local wild yeast indigenous to a particular vineyard to ferment wines made from that vineyard’s grapes. Muga uses this process int the fermentation of this week’s featured wine. The process begins by picking a small amount of grapes shortly before the full harvest which are crushed and allowed to start fermenting from the native yeasts already present on the grapes. This culture is then added to the rest of the grapes when they are picked to initiate fermentation. In organic and biodynamic viniculture, it is part of the local conditions that define every vineyard…its terroir.
We visited the winery at Muga some years ago. Unfortunately, we also had some kind of bug that forced us to cancel several other winery visits we had scheduled. So we laid low, took some short walks through Haro’s narrow streets, and…during our convalescence we were entertained by the stork pair that were nesting on a rooftop directly across the narrow street from our little second-floor apartment. Curiously, despite being under the weather, our memories are fond ones. Haro is a small community, in a pretty arid landscape surrounded by vineyards, with good food, charming and friendly people, and a surprising number of rooftop stork nests. What more could you want??
By the way, just tasted this lovely Rioja for the first time about an hour ago…it is big, luscious, nuanced, and powerful, from new vineyards acquired and developed by Muga over recent decades. Seriously tasty!
Economics of the Heart: Climate Crisis Deepens
photo courtesy NOAA/NWS
We have known for nearly 50 years that burning fossil fuels was a Faustian bargain. Early models in the 70’s were remarkably accurate in predicting how increasing concentrations of CO2 and other hydrocarbons produced by the combustion of fossil fuels would affect global climate. As models and data got better, our predictions got better; and as our predictions got better, giant energy companies found ways to subvert any attempts to decrease the rapidly growing production and use of the gas, oil, and coal that were adding heat to the atmosphere and more wealth to people who already had plenty.
A warmer atmosphere does all of the things that heat does on a bigger and bigger scale each year. Increasing evaporation of oceans, rivers, and lakes takes more water into the atmosphere and moves it to a cooler latitude, and releases it as rain. The increasing heat in the atmosphere also creates higher winds with more kinetic energy and increasingly destructive winds, rainfall, catastrophic flooding in some places, and stifling drought in others.
Every living thing is threatened by these changes. Entire ecosystems that had slowly developed symbiosis among the life forms around them and thrived for millennia are now threatened. And we humans, we who are causing all this stress and destruction, keep acting as though it’s no big deal, someone will find some way to adapt.
Over the last week or two I have found myself picturing Q, the cynical-yet-God-like-powered character from the Star Trek series, looking down his nose at us deceptive and self-serving human beings and observing with a cynical sneer, “Well, now, isn’t that Convenient for you!” as Corporate Mindlessness rationalizes the continued destruction of the living systems upon which all life depends.
Many places in the world have already experienced devastating climate-related disasters, and this summer has been a particularly sobering Slap in the Face to our short-sighted selfishness. For some reason, yesterday’s sudden, catastrophic, and heartbreaking wind-driven fire-storm in Lahaina, is particularly shocking: so fast, so brutal, so complete, a worst nightmare in a place we all think of as a paradise.
We swear and sob at these things that are happening more and more frequently, with worse and worse destruction, in more and more places. The fires and floods and winds are getting worse and worse, and the prospects of rebuilding are becoming less and less rational in more and more places. The ice is melting rapidly at both poles. People in Arizona can only leave their air-conditioned homes between sunset and sunrise.
Given the human penchant to revert to feudal/authoritarian political economies under enough stress, the rapidly increasing costs of climate disasters, within our nation and across the world, are made even more poignantly disturbing.
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