lummi island wine tasting feb 28 ’20
click on photos for larger images
Friday Breads This Week
Poolish Ale – the preferment here is a poolish, made with bread flour, a bit of yeast and a nice ale beer for the liquid and fermented overnight. Mixed the next day with bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat. This makes a great all around bread with a nice crisp crust – $5/loaf
Buckwheat Walnut & Honey – a flavorful artisan bread also made with a poolish, fresh milled buckwheat and bread flour. Buckwheat is not a grain it is actually a seed and closer in the plant family to rhubarb and sorrel than to wheat and contains no gluten. Though this bread is not gluten-free (it is includes bread flour made from wheat) it has an earthy buckwheat flavor balanced with a little honey. Some toasted walnuts add a nice crunch…goes well with meats and cheeses – $5/loaf
Brioche Tarts au Sucre – aka brioche sugar tarts. A rich brioche dough full of eggs and butter is rolled into a round tart and topped with more eggs, cream, butter and sugar. – 2/$5
(breads must be pre-ordered by Wednesday for pickup here at the wine shop at our Friday wine tasting, 4-6pm. Planning a visit to the Island? Email us to get on the mailing list!)
Climate Notes: Anti-Greta
Over the last decade in general and roughly coinciding, we notice, with Darth McConnell’s Death Grip on control of the US Senate (Abandon All Hope All Bills Which Enter Here…), our country has been taken down an evolving (devolving?) road of Epic Environmental Ignorance and Catastrophe which threatens the existence of All Life on our Dear Planet Earth. One of the bright lights that has recently buoyed both our spirits and our hopes for continuing Life on Planet Earth has been the emergence this year of the young voice of unlikely environmental heroine Greta Thunberg. In the past year, young Greta has reflected our complacency back upon us, basically pointing her finger at us and crying a deeply touching lament: we are killing the Planet that sustains what may be the only Life in the entire Universe. Heavy stuff, bringing a Profound sense of Grief to those of us who have studied and warned about these things for the last fifty years, to no avail. And we keep asking, WTF is wrong with our species?
The latest entrant in this ongoing-for-a-few-more-years Existential Moral Combat is a young woman named Naomi Seibt, who has been recently recruited/created by the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank committed to Denying that the global climate is getting dangerously hostile to Life because of human destruction of the thermodynamic balance that brought forth and has maintained Life in this tiny, fragile, unique, and fleeting Oasis for hundreds of millions of years.
Nineteen-year-old Naomi has been designed and weaponized to counter the visceral emotional appeal that Thunberg evokes when she speaks of the Global Destruction Sequence that has already been initiated by two hundred years of exponentially increasing combustion of fossil fuels by our species.
Naomi Klein introducing Greta Thunberg
Mar a Lago Update: At Stake This Weekend
As one would expect, fivethirtyeight.com has some very interesting takes on the importance of the coming week in determining who will be the Democratic Presidential candidate in this year’s election. We have the South Carolina primary this weekend followed by “Super Tuesday,” when another dozen states including delegate-rich California and Texas hold their primaries on March 3.
At the moment the race is leaning toward Bernie Sanders, but Joe Biden is expected to do well with black voters who make up the majority of the electorate in South Carolina. The link above analyzes three different scenarios for the SC primary outcomes, all looking closely at the likely Sanders-Biden relative outcomes. Although Biden did not show well in the Iowa, NH, or Nevada caucuses/primaries (all of which Sanders won), his long relationships with SC politics make him the favorite in this particular primary.
When the primaries are one at a time, winning can give a candidate something of “Bandwagon Effect” that adds Momentum to a campaign in States to follow. All that adds up to a lot of pressure on Biden to achieve a strong showing in SC this weekend, and he is widely expected to do quite well. The big Takeaways from the 538 article are that: 1) the better he does in SC, the better he will do on Super Tuesday (the Momentum factor), and 2) the better he does on Super Tuesday, the better shot he has at the nomination.
All of that adds up to a lot at stake for them and for the country in the coming week. This article does not even look at other candidates than Biden or Bernie in this piece. We are still trying to decide our votes for our own WA primary on March 10, though of course we all have our leanings. But one thing is for sure: Anyone but the Tweetster! So say we All!
Washington Post Tweetster Lie Count to date : 16,241 as of 01/24/20
This week’s tasting
Terra d’Oro Moscato ’18 California $14
Intoxicating aromas of perfumed peach blossom and fresh honeysuckle with sweet, creamy lemon cheesecake flavors and bright, fresh apricot and white peach on the palate. Crisp, rich, and balanced with lingering notes of rose petal.
Chat Auzias Cabardes Red ’17 France $11
Dark berries with a hint of eucalyptus; medium body with good acidity and notes of raspberry and sweet oak on the lingering finish.
Townshend Cellars T3 red blend Washington $17
Bordeaux style blend of cab, merlot and cab franc; fruit forward with hints of black currant and vanilla, with layers of complexity and depth through extensive oak aging in French and American barrels.
Edi Simcic Duet ’16 Slovenia $30
Merlot, Cab Sauv, Cab Franc; bold and compelling, with notes of chocolate, cherries, cheesecake, and coffee on silky tannins and a lush, ripe, fruit-full body that goes on and on.
Lady Hill Cabernet Franc ’16 Oregon $32
Aromas of raisined berry fruit, sugared dates, chocolate, caramel and orange peel lead to a rich, lush, palate with flavors of raisin, cocoa, coffee and toffee. Great on its own or with any kind of chocolate, Stilton cheese. or toasted walnuts.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
2072 Granger Way