lummi island wine tasting Feb 21 ’25
Wine Tasting Friday Feb 21 4-6 pm
clouds’ illusions we recall…
Friday Bread Pickup This Week
Breton – Incorporates the flavors of the french Brittany region. Bread flour and fresh milled buckwheat and rye make for interesting flavor and the salt is set gris -the grey salt from the region that brings more mineral flavors to this bread. – $5/loaf
Spelt Levain – Spelt is an ancient grain that is a wheat. It has a nutty, slightly sweet flavor and has gluten but it isn’t as strong as the gluten in modern wheat. This bread is made with a culture that is used to create a levain before the final dough is mixed with traditional bread flour, spelt flour, fresh milled whole spelt and fresh milled whole rye. It is a great all around bread – $5/loaf
Gibassiers – A traditional french pastry recipe from southern France. Made with a delicious sweet dough full of milk, butter, eggs and olive oil, with orange flower water, candied orange peel and anise seed. After baking they are brushed with melted butter and sprinkled with more sugar. – 2/$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
Juggernaut Chardonnay ’22 Sonoma $17
Barrel fermented; aromas of apple, Asian pear and lemon meringue open to rich, lingering flavors of stone fruit, honeysuckle, and yellow plum, with finishing notes of vanilla, butter cream and hints of clove.
The Wolftrap Syrah Mourvèdre Viognier ’21 South Africa $13
Consistently appealing aromas and flavors of ripe plum, red currant, violets, Italian herbs and exotic spices; vibrant flavors of dark berries and spicy plum with hints of orange peel that linger on a juicy finish. (read more)
Marietta Old Vine Red ’22 California $16
Zinfandel-based red blend from Geyserville with lovely bright plum fruit, dark and focused notes of briar and black tea, perfect balance of big flavor and vibrant sophistication, with medium body, sweet spice and velvety tannins to pair with almost any occasion.
Economics of the Heart: Prosperity Depends on Trust
Maggit leader poses proudly for Fox cameras…
While musing for a topic this week, I came across this site for Deloitte’s Economic Outlook for January. In the early years of the wine shop we had a periodic Canadian visitor who would load up a box of white wines, stay for a little chat, and disappear for some months. As I recall he had been with Deloitte for some years, and that they had something to do with “accounting.” Those were always enjoyable conversations, and I have been curious about the company; so on a whim clicked on the report and was pleasantly surprised to find an engaging perspective on a broad range of international economic topics that affect everyone, everywhere, every day.
Moreover, every one of these global economic perspectives underlines the absolute necessity of open, honest, collaborative economic and political relationships among all the countries of the world to have any collective hope for a sustainable future. Below are links and brief intros to four arenas that will be affecting the future of the entire world, and which will be made much worse by the ongoing coup attempt of Maggit loyalists, who have no clue about any of it, angrily tearing down 250 years of Constitutional government for no particular reason.
Read on…
“The best” combination of policies should allow real US GDP to grow by 2.4% in 2025 before slowing to 1.7% in 2026. The negative economic effects of tariffs, such as higher inflation and weaker real GDP growth, are not expected to be fully felt until 2026 as per our baseline scenario. In the meantime, rising tariffs will encourage frontloading of imports and consumer spending. On the positive side, this is expected to boost consumer spending temporarily and raise business inventories. On the downside, it is expected to cause imports to grow faster than exports, thereby creating a drag on GDP from the external sector making our baseline scenario highly unlikely to materialize exactly as we have outlined here. Understanding the uncertainty surrounding federal policy, we have created alternative scenarios where the economy could perform better or worse depending on the mix of those policies. This scenario would cause US real GDP to grow by just 1.6% in 2025 and contract by 2.1% in 2026.
There are countless ways international goods trade will keep changing in response to climate change. For example, EU countries impose a carbon tax on energy imports proportional to their carbon impacts, decreasing their demand relative to renewable or lower-carbon resources. Despite Maggit-man’s $multimillion debt to Big Oil while alienating much of the world against the US, both our carbon production and consumption are likely to substantially slow our progress toward a greener economy.
COVID-19 and Income Inequality
Disparities in income and wealth continue to be exacerbated because of differentials in occupational employment among US racial groups. Blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately employed in low-paying occupations5; low-paying jobs were often shed most quickly in a recession, Black and Hispanic jobs were both more likely to be disrupted by Covid shutdowns, least likely to have health insurance, and most likely to have been earning the least. Rising income inequality during recessions is a consistent consequence of worsening labor market conditions during a downturn, making rising income inequality a predictable consequence of worsening labor market conditions during a downturn.
The Link Between Trust and Economic Prosperity
The share of the global population that believes “most people can be trusted” fell by roughly 20% over the last 15 years.1 Rising inequality, political polarization, and a higher frequency of what were previously considered once-in-a-lifetime disruptions, such as the Covid pandemic, have exacerbated this downward trend, with serious implications for the economy. In fact, in 1972, Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow famously wrote, “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust, certainly any transaction conducted over a period of time.”2 A business (or government) thrives on the cumulative trust each of its stakeholders place in it. In this sense, trust is like an interdependent web that connects all actors in an economy and influences how they work together to drive or stifle growth; as trust improves, economic prosperity grows…and, we presume, vice versa.
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