lummi island wine tasting aug 4-5 ’23
Hours this weekend: Friday & Saturday, July 28-29, 4-6 pm
This week’s wine tasting:
Natura Rose ’21 Chile $12
Cold-soaked before pressing and cold-fermented on the skins to develop rich and nuanced aromas and flavors of grassy lime, tropical fruits, and lychee, with a crisp, lingering finish.
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…”
Lancyre Pic St Loup Vielles Vignes ’17
100 % malbec; unfolds with dark, enchanting notes of blackberry, grilled plum, and jammy raspberry with accents of orange peel, vanilla, and tobacco spice, finishing with balanced structure, plush texture, and a lengthy finish.
Friday Bread Pickup This Week
Fig Anise – Made with a sponge that is fermented overnight, then the final dough is mixed with bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat. Honey, dried figs and anise bring in all the flavors of the mediterranean. A great flavorful bread – $5/loaf
Sesame Semolina – Uses a sponge pre-ferment that ferments some of the flour, water & yeast before mixing the final dough. Made with semolina and bread flour and a soaker of cornmeal, millet and sesame seeds and a little olive oil to round out the flavor and tenderize the crumb; rolled in sesame seeds before baking– lots of great flavors! – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Chocolate Croissants – traditional laminated french pastry with a bit of sourdough flavor and another pre-mass hypnosisferment to help strengthen the dough and create the traditional “honeycomb” interior. Rolled out and shaped with delicious dark chocolate in the center. –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: Lancyre Pic St Loup Vielles Vignes ’17 France $22
The “Pic” which dominates the small French wine region of Pic St. Loup is a 640-m (2000 ft.) “Tooth” of granite that dominates the view for many miles in every direction– powerful, beautiful, vaguely remote, and iconic. It looms over a collection of very special, well-drained, limestone-rich vineyards. About an hour north of Montpellier on the Mediterranean coast to the south, it features hot days but is far enough north to have Atlantic-influenced cool nights that induce slow, full ripening.
The wines from Pic St. Loup must be predominantly syrah, grenache, and mourvedre (as in nearby Southern Rhone) and fairly consistently have a certain gravitas. The vines must be at least six years old (not the usual three) before considered mature enough for making red wines, but are perfect for making excellent rosé! Vineyards are scattered among rugged terrain that slopes up from the Mediterranean. Atlantic influences make the local climate cooler and wetter than elsewhere in Languedoc.
We have carried their rosés for many years, but it has been a long time since we have poured one of its old vine reds!
Mar a Lago Update Revisited: Democracy at a Crossroad
We humans are a selfish and brutal bunch with a long history of deceit and violence, and the more of us there are on this tiny planet the worse it seems to be getting.
We are all wired like Gollum, and also like Jesus or Buddha. In any given moment we can all be either one, and it is not a matter of religion. It is an ongoing conflict between our individual ambitions and our ability to have compassion for those who are suffering. It’s not that complicated; it’s as if we all have some crossed wires sometimes about mine, yours, and ours.
Our country’s founding premises some 250 years ago embodied the Enlightenment principles of Humanism. We all have the same needs for physical and emotional safety and nourishment and a sense of belonging in a community of shared values and mutual respect. Those needs made the default organization of the earliest humans a tribal cooperative that needed each other to survive and, when possible, to thrive.
Some evidence suggests that modern homo sapiens first appeared perhaps as recently as 40,000 years ago and subsumed or out-competed and/or interbred with other humanoids, including Neanderthals. (most of us have some Neanderthal DNA). As described in Sapiens, by Yuval Harrari, our species has made a profound mark on our world in a very short period of time. We are both creative and destructive, kind and ruthless, sometimes creators of both beauty and horror.
Several millennia of civilization have put boundaries around many of those instincts, but under enough duress any of us is capable of anything to protect ourselves, our friends, our families, and our communities from outside threats—or, perhaps, to advance our political interests.
During the 2016 campaign it became apparent that the Tweetster (duck in sunglasses!) was able to stoke a latent paranoia among ordinarily rational people that convinced them that various Others were invading America to Steal their Stuff: Muslims, Mexicans, non-whites, non-Christians. Everyone who was different was a threat, and the Tweetster was able to turn those latent fears and prejudices into a political movement. He was able to connect with their inner fears by giving voice to them. At the same time, those same behaviors evoked the opposite reaction from many of us, making him a particularly polarizing and manipulative figure, not unlike Hitler or Mussolini. Our nation is still deeply polarized from the vastly different realities evoked by competing media orientations.
2016 wasn’t a typical political campaign– it was more some kind of mass hypnosis. Even today, as the Tweetster faced his Third (and most compelling) indictment (on the Jan 6 insurrection), no doubt a large number of Americans (perhaps including you) take it for granted that everything he has said and that Fox and Twitter and Christian Radio have echoed for the last six years is True, because somehow that message justifies their own self-doubt, their own dissatisfaction with their station, and their need to have someone to blame for their sense that they deserve more and those Others deserve less.
At root all of this tension has exposed a deep rift in the common values that have held this nation together. Right here on our little island we see in our local social media unkindness and judgment which benefits no one. There is no way of telling if the Tweetster caused all of this fear, anger, and distrust in our nation, or vice versa. Either way, it’s gonna be a long year or two till this gets sorted out.
There is an old Maine story about a young fellow racing along a rural road in Maine in his sports car and hits a cow that stepped into the road. He comes quickly to a stop and walks back to see the cow still standing and the farmer next to it. The kid says hopefully, “Um, well, she seems to be okay…??” The farmer pauses for a long time before saying, “Well sonny, I’ll tell yuh…if yuh think yuh done ‘er any good, I’ll be happy to pay yuh for it…”
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