lummi island wine tasting dec 3 ’21
Current Covid Protocols
Tastings this weekend will be both Friday and Saturday from 4-6 pm, with attendance subject to our ongoing Covid requests:
— You must have completed a full Covid vaccination sequence to participate;
— We ask all guests to maintain mindful social distance from people outside your regular “neighborhood pods.”
Holiday Schedule
Each Holiday Season brings lots of travel plans, challenging weather, and a certain bustle of distractions. After some consideration of our own family travel commitments, we will be closed Christmas weekend (Dec 24-25), and New Year’s weekend (Dec 31-Jan 1).
However, we will be OPEN as usual for Friday Bread Pickup and Fri-Sat wine tasting December 3-4, 10-11, and 17-18. And for the moment, our January schedule remains uncertain; please stay tuned!
Friday Bread This Week
Each Sunday bread offerings for the coming Friday are emailed to the mailing list by Island Bakery. Orders returned by the 5 pm Tuesday deadline are baked and available for pickup each Friday at the wine shop from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. To get on the bread order mailing list, click on the Contact Us link at the top of the page and fill out the form.
Over the years the bakery has established a rotating list of several dozen breads and pastries from which two different artisan breads and a pastry are selected each week.
This week’s deliveries:
Pain au Levain – Made with a nice mix of bread flour and freshly milled whole wheat and rye flours. After building the sourdough over several days the final dough is mixed and then 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
Raisin Spice – Made with a poolish fermented overnight before the final dough is mixed next day using bread flour, freshly milled whole wheat, and rolled oats, then some honey for sweetness, a little milk for a tender crumb and raisins and a healthy dose of speculoos (speculaas), a holiday spice mix popular in The Netherlands and Belgium using cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, white pepper, anise, ginger, and cardamom mixed into the dough for a hearty, rustic loaf. – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Gibassiers – A traditional french pastry from the south of France. Made with a delicious sweet dough full of milk, butter, eggs and olive oil. The addition of orange flower water, candied orange peel and anise seed bring great flavor to these pastries. After baking they are brushed with melted butter and sprinkled with more sugar. Ooh La La! – 2/$5
Wines of the Week: Wine Suggestions for After Your Holiday Dinner
This weekend’s tasting will be hosted by our friend and sommelier Steven Brown, who also poured our tasting a couple of weeks ago. This time he has brought several after-dinner fortified wines including a sherry, a madeira, and a port.
Principe de Barbadillo Amontillado
First aged as a Manzanilla under a velum of natural flor yeast for 8 years and a further 7 years of oxidative aging. Shows extraordinary nose of almonds and walnuts and a brandy-like edge with and tangy salinity. On the palate, displays coastal/saline elements with hints of almonds, walnuts, and zesty lemon peel.
Justino’s Fanal Madeira Rainwater
Madeira Rainwater is a Medium dry blend of Verdelho and Tinta Negra aged for five years, and which makes an excellent summer pairing with salads and spicy foods.
Justino’s Fanal Madeira Full Rich Royal Oporto 10 Year Tawny Oporto (in decanter)
Quite dark in color, with rich fresh fruit flavors; perfumed and delicate, it shows light sweetness, a good layer of fruit and wood acidity, leaving a dry aftertaste.
The Economics of the Heart: The War On Reproductive Rights
“‘Mit Kind II’ (‘With Child II’)” by wwwuppertal is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
Over the past forty years we have seen Republicans invest wholeheartedly in making racism, abortion, gun rights, and immigration their ongoing political Straw Men. Any time of day, wherever you are in the country, you can turn on Fox News or rural talk radio, or click on uncountable conspiracy theory websites that continually churn out repetitive streams of Nonsense that their followers are, let’s face it, too stupid or brainwashed to question.
As a political strategy, it was very effective at giving Republicans control of the South and much of rural America for some forty years, and they have used that power to transfer wealth and income from the pockets of millions of rural voters in their own base to a handful of billionaire campaign contributors that have kept them in power all these years. Beginning in the Gingrich 90’s, Republican cynicism and hypocrisy doubled down on its commitment to loot the Federal Government for themselves and their cronies while making the middle class poor and the poor destitute.
Donald Trump, showman and scammer extraordinaire, was their Dream Candidate. With the sheer force of his malignant personality and complete lack of ethics, he was able to take complete control of the Party by turning his base against anyone who questioned his authority, and most Republicans have either quit politics or dutifully prostrated themselves before him as required. (You know, like Lindsay Graham and the entire parade of party leaders now being subpoenaed by the House January 6 Committee.) Trump gave party leaders many things they craved, including Mitch McConnell’s longstanding Wet Dream of having impenetrable Conservative control of the Supreme Court.
Which brings us to the harsh reality that our Supreme Court is leaning like the Tower of Pisa toward giving states the right to regulate women’s access to safe and legal abortion as part of their family planning responsibilities. Just this week we heard the kinds of questions the Justices asked the presenting lawyers as they prepare to decide whether the new abortion regulation law in Mississippi is Constitutional. There is wide speculation that a majority of Justices will allow the law to stand, opening the door for each State to set its own rules governing a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body in that State. And, cementing Republican dominance in Blatant Hypocrisy, these are the same people that adamantly oppose any government mandate to get a vaccination during a pandemic because, you know, a man has a Constitutional right to control his own body, but apparently a woman might not for much longer.
Many of the questions posed to the lawyers by the Justices revealed a very shallow intellectual concept of all that is at stake for a woman and her family in deciding whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. In particular, the line of questioning taken by Justice Barrett seemed particularly detached from the range of challenges facing an individual woman with a particular pregnancy at a particular time in her life, with whatever set of complicating circumstances might constrain her ability to take on a twenty-year parenting commitment. Nor, in the case of Justice Barrett’s flippant question, does it seem reasonable that a woman should be required to carry every pregnancy to term or miscarriage and then abandon it at the hospital for adoption and just walk out if she isn’t interested in motherhood. Really? Yes, she actually said that.
Years ago, when I was training to be a psychotherapist, a conversation about abortion evolved in a workshop of twenty or so people. It was triggered by a process we were all watching between one of the female students (40-ish) and one of the instructors. The session was very intense, exploring lingering issues the woman was still dealing with from a long ago abortion, and evoked a lot of emotion for all present. In subsequent discussion, it turned out that several other women in the group had also had gone through similar experiences, and shared their stories. There were lots of tears and anguish, compassion, and embracing. Most of them had had other children before or after the abortion experience.
My deeply felt conviction during and since that experience is that no woman is blasé about getting an abortion. Whatever the reasons, the decision is made with deep reservations and inner conflicts, inconvenient or unfair constraints of personal health, marital situation, financial considerations, or the needs of other children in the family. It is a heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching dilemma with no simple answer, and the source of a lifetime of second-guessing.
At root, getting pregnant is easy, and raising children is a long, difficult commitment. Human beings are destroying entire species by the millions as we reproduce more and more of our kind and poison the planet with our chemicals, our plastics, and our short-sighted so-called “intelligence.” Are Republicans saying that what the world really needs are a few billion more human beings? That God’s Plan is to bury us in our own waste?
Each human birth imposes decades of resource consumption on our Planet. Economists (including this one) have long advocated rationing births by lotteries, licenses, birth taxes, or birth control subsidies, with the utopian goal of “a sustainable future for fewer humans.”
Scary times.
This week’s $5 tasting:
see above!
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2072 Granger Way