lummi island wine tasting aug 16-17 ’24
Hours, August 16-17 ’24
Friday 4-6 pm Saturday 3-5 pm
Friday Bread This Week
Black Pepper Walnut- made with a nice mix of flours, bread flour, fresh milled whole wheat and rye. A fair amount of black pepper and toasted walnuts give this bread great flavor with just a bit of peppery bite to it. Works well with all sorts of meats and cheese- $5/loaf
Four Seed Buttermilk – Includes all the elements of whole wheat, adding cracked wheat and bran in to the bread flour instead of milling whole wheat berries. It also has buttermilk and oil for a tender bread and a little tang, and finished with a bit of honey and sunflower, pumpkin, and sesame seeds and toasted millet – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Muffins – Four muffins/ $5… two each of: Cinnamon Streusel – Made with flour, sugar, eggs and butter with a brown sugar, butter, pecan and cinnamon filling swirled through the batter and then topped with a streusel made with more butter, brown sugar and pecans and as if that isn’t enough topped with a cream cheese glaze, and... Chocolate – Rich and delicious; chocolaty and incredibly moist to last a day or two. Made with all the things that muffins good: flour, brown sugar, sour cream and eggs; with plenty of chocolate chips stirred in and sprinkled on top!
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 at least a week before visiting!
This week’s Wine Tasting:
Idilico Albarino ’22 Washington $17
Fermented on the lees for four months, lightly cold stabilized, fined and filtered before bottling; nose of citrus and tropical fruit leads to luscious, crisp, and refreshing flavors. “Drink anytime the sun shines…”
Goose Ridge g3 Red ’20 Washington $17
Syrah-cab-merlot blend; supple ripe plum and blackberry notes with hints of spice, vanilla, black currant and Bing cherry. Nicely balanced with a lush, round mouth and a long, lingering finish.
Sineann Cabernet Sauvignon Lady Hawk ’21 Oregon $27
Classic Columbia Valley cab– dark, well-balanced, food friendly, and age-worthy. “We easily could have vineyard-designated any of the components of this Cabernet; we chose instead to blend it into this gorgeous wine. You will rarely experience a wine this good that costs this little!”
Economics of the Heart: The $War For $Everything Continues…
Costco’s Wine Monopoly / Davinci AI
We started this little wine business on a whim in 2005. We knew nothing about wine except that it was tasty and deeply interwoven in human history, geography, and customs. The more we learned and tasted, the more interesting it became. Every varietal, vineyard, culture, cuisine, and region has its own very long story. It’s been an interesting journey!
Fyi, one requires a different State license to sell wine as a producer, retailer, or wholesale distributor. The passage of the 21st Amendment to the Constitution in 1933 marked the end of Prohibition (and the extensive black markets it had spawned), and established the “3-tiered system” to provide predictable and stable rules for all the players in the industry. In our case, we are licensed as a “wine retail outlet.” Until 2011, Washington law provided that all retailers paid the same wholesale price for every wine purchased for resale.
That all came to a screeching halt in late 2011 when Washington State yielded to years of financial pressure from Costco by closing State Liquor stores and eliminating the 3-tier system which had been in place for 90 years. The fallout was immediate and has continued to this day. The State lost a valuable source of revenue; very large buyers like Costco got gigantic volume discount prices from producers and wholesalers, and countless small wine distributors we had worked with for years went out of business within the first year. Costco gained something of a monopoly on retail (and in some states, wholesale too).
Btw, this is exactly the kind of market-disrupting distortion that antitrust legislation was designed to eliminate. By the late 1800’s John D. Rockefeller expanded his Standard Oil Company into some 40 subsidiary companies, making it “a maze of legal structures which made its workings virtually impervious to public investigation and understanding.” And perhaps more apropos to our particular case here in Washington, there is the equally famous A&P antitrust case. As the very first “supermarket,” it grew into the first chain of thousands of supermarkets, A&P monopolized the grocery business for many decades. It stifled competition through “tying agreements” with its suppliers, and generated extraordinary profits for its corporate owners. Even when broken up by the courts, it still formed the model for all the grocery chains that followed.
In similar fashion, over the next several years the new “Costco liquor laws” spawned an explosion of gigantic distributor-retailer warehouses with acres of floor space, and which now pay so much less under the new laws than small retailers like us that they can easily make a profit selling at our wholesale buying price. This concentration of market power is exactly what the Three-Tier system was designed to prevent. As most of you know, “The Islander,” our dear local General Store does virtually ALL of its wholesale buying at Costco. This is what market concentration is about, folks. Like the proverbial Company Store, its leverage forces wineries to give it massive discounts.
The Big Takeaway here is that Republicans have been grump-stipated for the almost 100 years by New Deal restrictions on competition-reducing market interference. The Costco Law is just one. Others include Citizens United and other Supreme Court decisions that have increasingly benefited a handful of ultra-wealthy individuals at the expense of the other 8 billion of us.
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2072 Granger Way