lummi island wine tasting dec winter solstice ’24
Wine Tasting hours through December
NOTES:
- We are open as usual Friday, Dec 20 for both wine tasting and bread pickup;
- Closed Dec 27 and Jan 3;
- Open for both wine tasting and bread pickup on Friday, Jan 10.
Below is a rare sunny winter solstice photo of a sunset over Orcas Island from our place, marking the year’s shortest day and sunset’s southernmost position before heading back north with more daylight and warmth…!
Friday Bread This Week
Italian Breakfast Bread – A sweetly delicious bread! Made with bread flour, eggs, yogurt, a little sugar and vanilla, with dried cranberries, golden raisins, and candied lemon peel. Perfect for breakfast toast or how about some Easter morning French Toast!? – $5/loaf
Cranberry Walnut Rolls – Something a bit different this week to help everybody get ready for Christmas. Dinner rolls, pick them up on Friday, throw in the freezer, then straight into the oven frozen just before dinner and have delicious fresh rolls for Christmas and I’ll do all the work. Or save for leftover turkey sandwiches, yummm. Made with bread flour, milk, brown sugar and eggs. Then loaded up with toasted walnuts and dried cranberries. 4/$5.
and pastry this week…
Cranberry Muffins – Inspired by a well known coffee shop’s cranberry bliss bars these muffins are made with all the traditional muffin ingredients: flour, sugar, eggs, buttermilk and butter. A generous helping of fresh cranberries, toasted pecans, white chocolate chips and topped with a brown sugar streusel finish them off. Yum! – 4/$5.
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday the Bakery emails the week’s bread offering to the mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday (and not already claimed) will be available for pickup at the wine shop Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. Contact us at least two weeks before your visit to get on the bread list .
This week’s Wine Tasting
Since we have just received our annual shipment of Italian wines from our friends at Small Vineyards in West Seattle (ordered last summer sometime), it seems appropriate to open a few to celebrate the coming Holiday Season. All of the SV wines meet several criteria that distinguishes them from more familiar mass-produced wines. Those wines are each produced in small quantities by a family operated, sustainably farmed, single estate farm, with grapes picked by hand as they have been for generations. We are big fans, and always pleased to show them off.
Tre Donne Roero Arneis ’23 Italy $21
Pale golden yellow; soft aromas of orange blossom, honeysuckle, nectarine, and lemon verbena; flavors of pear, peach, quince, and green apple; enduring minerality and balanced acidity.
Brunelli Martoccia di Luca Rosso di Montalcino ’20 Italy $24
Classic, dignified structure with approachable, wonderfully bright fruit; bright nose of cranberry, cherry, and slate; smooth, integrated tannins, and thoughtful, composed finish.
Château de Crouseilles Madiran ’20 France $32
A big, bold, old vine blend of tannat, cab franc, and cab sauv, with a dense, inky core and slightly lighter rim; youthful nose of dark plum, kirsch, bay leaf, tobacco and mild oak, and a dense, restrained tannic structure of darker fruit with herbaceous and peppery flavors. A big wine.
Antonio Sanguineti Passo Santo White Dessert Wine Italy $18
Translated as Passo Santo (“blessed moment”) is a light dessert wine with aromas and flavors of toasted hazelnuts, caramel, honey, and dried apricot, pairing well with rich biscotti or crème
brûlée, and also zingy enough to pair nicely with cheese at the end of a meal.
Economics of the Heart: The Peculiar Karma of JD Vance
The ongoing dissonance of Maga Noise has caused us to pull way back from our evening news habits of the last few years. Scrolling through each day’s You Tube news offerings again dominated by the Tweetster is more than anyone can take, so we avoid it. It’s like having the front door suddenly blow open and having your house filled with running, squealing, grunting pigs wreaking havoc on your home and your mind, evoking the realization that no, you cannot– WILL not — continue to subject yourself to the 24/7 Maga Sh*t Stream.
So, we are definitely making some progress breaking away from the purposeful, ongoing, meaningless stream of dissonant Noise from billionaire-controlled news sources, and it is having a calming effect. Still looking for groups and sites and individuals who are telling verifiable truths online every day; we know they are out there.
Meanwhile, we are still trying to make sense of the new Maga Circus of Chaos. In particular, who benefits, and how, from having a bunch of idiots, fools, and full-on traitors running the day to day functioning of our very complex government? Every Cabinet member must have broad understanding and experience to keep each Department running. It all depends on the new Congress and the new Administration, but it’s hard to believe that there aren’t a handful of Republican Senators who will refuse to approve these bozo nominations.
Which brings us to incoming VP Vance, an interesting and pretty much unknown quantity, who has arrived at this position on a strange sequence of unlikely karmic events, including his book that mentioned several of them. He is particularly interesting because everybody knows the Tweetster is losing whatever “mind” he ever had, and is completely incapable of actual executive activities. One would hope that Project 2025 has some fences around his playground such that he gets the constant coverage but they pull the levers. (of course, that might actually be worse…) So it is not a huge leap to imagine that Vance was picked as VP so Trump can be Article 25’d by his cabinet when necessary, and Vance would be their new guy.
Despite his personal memoir on his youth, Vance maintains a certain opacity. At the same time we know he had some interesting formative experiences that will continue to have an effect on his character and how he handles his new job as VP. Of particular significance is his stint in the Marine Corps right out of high school. As reported by Drew Lawrence in an article in military.com :
“In his 2016 book “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” which recounted his childhood in working-class Ohio, Vance said that his “final two years in the Marines flew by and were largely uneventful,” though he recalled two instances during his service that changed him.
- One was meeting with local Iraqis during his deployment there, which he said helped change his perspective on gratitude. The other was more of a “constant,” he wrote — about the mindset he learned while in the Corps where he reflected on climbing obstacles, buying cars as a young enlisted Marine without locking in to a 21% loan interest rate, and his role as a combat correspondent.
- “The Marine Corps demanded that I think strategically about these decisions, and then it taught me how to do so,” he wrote. “When I joined the Marine Corps, I did so in part because I wasn’t ready for adulthood. I didn’t know how to balance a checkbook, much less how to complete the financial aid forms for college. Now I knew exactly what I wanted out of my life and how to get there.”
It has been my experience that military vets in general, and Marines in particular, develop a particular sense of pride, camaraderie, and commitment that defines them for life. So even though I have not seen anything in Vance’s public behavior to illustrate it, I am convinced those things have to be there, and find some comfort in believing there are lines that, like Mike Pence, honor will not let him cross. I hope.
In addition, in his years in venture capital, Vance has rubbed shoulders with some very wealthy, bright, imaginative people who seem to have had an influence, including in particular libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, who was something of a mentor and consequential donor to his Senate campaign. But at some point Thiel felt that Vance was going too far with Trump, and did not support his VP candidacy.
Admittedly this isn’t much to count on, but we find comfort where we can. It is interesting that this guy has come out of nowhere and very possibly assume the Presidency should the Tweetster become legally incompetent (as well as, you know, intellectually and morally…).
Until I see otherwise, I think it is better than even odds to expect that if push really comes to shove, Vance’s inner Marine would more likely than not show up and do the more honorable thing.
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2072 Granger Way