lummi island wine tasting dec 8 ’23
Winter Hours: Open Fridays 4-6pm
LI slough with heron
Friday Bread Pickup This Week!
Buckwheat Rye – Fresh milled buckwheat and rye flours are soaked for several hours without any yeast in a method known as an autolyse. As buckwheat has no gluten and rye has very little, the autolyse allows the grain to start the overnight fermenting process in the refrigerator. The buckwheat-rye soaker is then mixed with bread flour, salt, yeast and a bit of honey. Goes well with all sorts of meats and cheese – $5/loaf
Whole Grain Spelt Sweet Levain – Also made with a levain of freshly milled whole wheat and whole spelt before mixing with bread flour and a nice combination of dried apricots, golden raisins, slivered almonds and both sunflower and flax seeds. Chock full of flavor!– $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Bear Claws! – Made with a Danish pastry dough rich in cream, eggs, sugar and butter. The dough is rolled out and spread with a filing made with almond paste, powdered sugar, egg whites and a bit of cinnamon to round out the flavor. Then, because all us bears love honey, topped with a honey glaze after baking! –2/$5
Island Bakery has developed a lengthy rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday Janice emails the week’s bread offering to her mailing list. Orders received before Wednesday 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.
This week’s wine tasting
Ponzi Pinot Gris ’21 Oregon $16
Aromas of honeydew melon, candied citrus peel, white peach and honeysuckle; balanced palate
of sweet tangerine peel, meringue, lime, apricot and light white pepper.
Angeline Cab Sauv ’21 California $16
Fruit-forward, easy-to-drink style with aromas of lush cherry, cassis, and plum and rich cherry and plum flavors with hints of vanilla and soft oak that linger on the palate and finish with complexity and length that over-delivers for the modest price.
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
Wine of the Week: Muga El Andén de la Estación Crianza ’19 Spain $21
“our” 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 in 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, these yeasts are part of the local conditions that define every vineyard…its terroir.
We visited the Muga winery in Haro 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 nesting about thirty feet away on the rooftop directly across the narrow street from our little second-floor apartment.
Curiously, despite having been 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??
This week’s lovely Rioja is big, luscious, nuanced, and powerful, from young vineyards acquired and developed by Muga over recent decades. Seriously tasty!
Economics of the Heart: Freedom From Religion
The First Amendment to the US Constitution reads: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
We usually have thought about the First Amendment as “Freedom of Religion,” which could easily be interpreted as “you can practice any religion you want.” But it can also be looked at as “you don’t have to have any religion at all if you don’t want one,” which immunizes you from the beliefs, practices, and superstitions of the followers of any and all religious sects. After all, since everyone tends to look at their own religion as the Truth, and everyone else’s religion as Superstition, the Supremacy Clause logically leaves the matter for individual conscience.
Last night NPR presented an interview with author Tim Alberta about his new book “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.” He is a young man whose father was a pastor at an evangelical church through his adolescence. Mr. Alberta speaks with clarity about how Evangelicals embraced the Tweetster early on as their own apostate representative in government who would remake America into the Christian Nation they fantasize it has always been. The takeaways from this insight are the double delusions that 1) he really cared about their beliefs, and 2) he shares their delusion that the United States has always been an “explicitly Christian Nation, not just informed by Judeo-Christian principles and values, but explicitly formed to be a Christian nation that has to be recovered and restored.”
It has also become clear in the past couple of weeks that the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, is a very far right, self-identified Christian evangelical who is very open about his intention to impose fundamentalist Christian views on the entire country, somehow outlawing all other religions, including, we may presume, any which are soft on abortion, same-gender marriage and adoption, and birth control. And this man is, at this very moment, only two heartbeats away from being the President of this country.
All this is going on in an America which is becoming increasingly secular. According to recent statistical analysis, although a slight majority of Americans consider themselves Christian, between 2006 and 2020 the number of self-identified “white evangelicals” dropped from 23% to 14%; the percentage of white Americans who considered themselves “white non-evangelical” remained constant at 16%, and white Catholics declined slightly from 16% to 12%.
Of particular interest is the rapid increase in the number of Americans who have no religious affiliation from 16% in 2006 to around 25% by 2020.
It is clear from the numbers and from Mr. Alberta’s observations that white evangelicals who cling to the fantasy of America as “their” country are feeling threatened by immigration of non-whites (even Christians ), people of other faiths or agnostics, and their abandonment by a growing proportion of young voters. They are over-reacting to these perceived threats by grasping at the Tweetster’s promises to take care of them if only he can acquire the Presidency again.
In the meantime the Republican Party has devolved into complete inability to discuss actual policy or to comprehend the consequences of their extended party-wide psychotic break. It is therefore something of a comfort to see the clear thinking of a young life-long evangelical who is speaking out on these issues.
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