lummi island wine tasting aug 27-28 ’21
Current Covid Protocols
The highly contagious Covid Delta variant continues to infect thousands of Americans, including vaccinated people, who may have no symptoms and no awareness if they/we are carriers. This creates a quandary about how to manage our social interactions.
For our part, because we put high values on both safety and being with “our people,” we have come up with this compromise for wine tasting this weekend.
- Wine tasting this weekend will be Friday only from 4-6pm, and it will be outside on the deck, next to the bread pickup table.
- You must have completed a full Covid vaccination protocol.
- You must maintain appropriate social distancing from people outside your regular “neighborhood pod.”
Friday Bread
Each Friday our friend Janice of Island Bakery delivers fresh bread ordered by email earlier in the week. Each Sunday she sends details on her offerings for the coming Friday to the email list. Orders must be returned to her by 5 pm on Tuesday. Subscribers typically receive the email with the the current week’s choices on Sunday, and have until 5pm Tuesday to get their orders in for pickup at the wine shop the following Friday from 4-5:30.
Over the years she has established a list of several dozen breads and pastries from which she selects two different artisan breads and a pastry each week. Over several years she has established a somewhat cyclical rotation through the recipes.
If you would like to be on the mailing list, click on the Contact Us link at the top of the page.
Wine of the Week: Zenato ‘Alanera’ Rosso Veronese ’18
Italy makes a very desirable and expensive wine called amarone. It is made from a blend of Corvina, Rondinella, and Corvinone in the wine region of Valpolicella. It is made from selected grapes that are dried for up to four months into juicy raisins before pressing, resulting in a concentrated, sumptuous, and delicious wine with very low yield.
After the amarone is drawn, the remaining must is used many more times with juice from valpolicella grapes to make ripasso. Each time fresh juice is ‘passed over’ the must, it gains body, flavor, and character. Ripasso is sometimes called “the poor man’s Amarone.”
The Zenato Alanera is another relative of amarone. It is essentially a ripasso with small amounts of cabernet sauvignon and merlot to add tannic structure, though the grapes were dried less than two months before extraction from the skins instead of four. The result is a modestly priced wine with compelling complexity, texture, and flavor, great with a hearty dinner, a good book, or even a few puffs on a really good cigar in a comfy chair by the fireplace.
tasting notes:
Dark, inky color; rich and focused nose, with ripe berries, dusty oak and a precise note of waxy vanilla bean. On the palate delivers extracted flavors of cherries, strawberry, clay and even a hint of crushed mint. Soft tannins, rounded finish.
Economics of the Heart: Property Rights and Economic Efficiency
A large part of the philosophical divide between the American Left and the American Right is a result of the ambiguity of property rights across a wide range of human interactions. The most divisive cases arise when the activities of one party impose costs or injuries on another party, and the law has not specified whether people have the right to injure without consequence or the right to be free from injury without compensation.
A considerable amount of economic theory has wrestled with these issues for a very long time. Should smokers pay for the right to smoke, or should non-smokers pay them to stop? Should polluters repair their environmental damages, or should communities pay polluters to stop?
We have witnessed the decades of Big Tobacco’s resistance even to acknowledge the lethality of long-term use of their products; the Auto Industry’s resistance to safety regulations; the Energy Industry’s denial of the reality of Global Warming; paint manufacturers’ denials that lead additives cause severe mental and physical damage…the list goes on and on and on.
In the fifty years since Earth Day, there has been a growing body of evidence and specific legal determinations that one party may not take actions that measurably damage another party without compensation. Sadly, there has been no general finding in law or even philosophy that lays out broadly applicable criteria defining when one person’s right to violate another person’s environmental quality hits the barrier of that other person’s right not to be violated. The current political game is that every single claim of harm will demand years of costly legal battles.
The global Covid pandemic has now brought us to perhaps our most head-scratching, “wtf”-ing, and “are you Serious”-ing responses to date. That is, millions of Americans are claiming a sovereign right NOT to get a vaccine that will not only protect them from a highly contagious and potentially fatal disease, but perhaps MORE IMPORTANTLY, will protect everyone around them as well.
As social animals, we all operate on two channels at the same time. The “Me” channel is concerned only with my name, independence, values, whims, needs, desires, and willfulness, while the “Unity” channel is concerned with the bigger picture of our names, interdependencies, survival, values, rules, and responsibilities.
While there are many people with variously compromised systems that should not get the vaccine, for everyone else, because our personal decisions have community.. and even Global…consequences, it is our collective and individual duty and social responsibility to suit up and play team ball…Please!
This week’s $5 tasting:
Casal Garcia Vinho Verde Rosé Portugal $10
Fruity notes of raspberries and strawberries on the well balanced acidity and the youthful, nouveau-beaujolais-like freshness which makes white vinho verde a perfect match for warm afternoons and fresh summer fare.
Pascual Toso Chardonnay ’17 Argentina $14
Aromas of ripe green apple, pineapple and mango. The palate is fresh, with great acidity, ending with a slight toasty hint on a lingering finish.
Zenato ‘Alanera’ Rosso Veronese ’18 Italy $17
Dark, inky color; rich and focused nose, with ripe berries, dusty oak and a precise note of waxy vanilla bean. On the palate delivers extracted flavors of cherries, strawberry, clay and even a hint of crushed mint. Soft tannins, rounded finish.
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2072 Granger Way