lummi island wine tasting feb 5, ’21
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Bread This Week
Pain Meunier -also known as miller’s bread and was developed to honor the miller who mills the wheat. It contains all portions of the wheat berry: flour, fresh milled whole wheat, cracked wheat and wheat germ. Always a favorite and a great all around bread. It makes the best toast! – $5/loaf
Sonnenblumenbrot – otherwise known as Sunflower Seed Bread made with bread flour and freshly milled rye, then loaded up with toasted sunflower seeds and some barley malt syrup for sweetness. This is a typical german seed bread. – $5/loaf
Rum Raisin Brioche: A delicious brioche dough full of eggs, butter and sugar. Filled with golden raisins and chunks of almond paste and as if that wasn’t enough, topped with a chocolate glaze before baking. Ooh la la, what’s not to like. I can only make a limited number so be sure to get your order in early. – 2/$5.
Wine of the Week: Quinta Do Vallado Red ’14
This winery has survived for three centuries in the Douro, a region renowned (like some in Spain) for its “nine months of winter and three months of hell,” and widely known for putting to test those who venture on its steep hillsides.
Younger vineyards made up 80% of the final blend of this wine, with 20% coming from 70-year-old vines. Most of the juice was fermented in stainless steel tanks for a week, except for a small percentage of the old vines fruit, which was foot-trodden and fermented in open ‘lagares‘ for the same period.
All the wine was fermented at between 25º and 27ºC. The finest of the press wine, from a traditional basket press, was also used for aging the final blend, with 80% aged for 14 months in stainless steel tanks. The remaining 20% was aged in used 225-l French Oak barriques for 14 months before final blending. All of this adds up to a complex wine with big lingering flavors and acidity.
Quinta Do Vallado Red ’14 Portugal $16
Blend of Touriga Franca,Touriga Nacional,Tinta Roriz, Sousão; Lovely floral black cherry and blackcurrant fruit has evolved from a tricky vintage with harvest interrupted by rain. At the beginning the wine was a bit tannic, but has softened to a really good vintage with lovely, fresh, supple, yet structured black fruits with pepper, meat and a lovely herbal twist.
Wine Emergencies…Who Ya Gonna Call?
While Covid continues to limit our movements and associations, we will continue to help you keep your wine shelves topped up. We know how it is…one minute your wine shelves are reassuringly stocked, and the very next day you reach for something and OMD, where did it all go?? It happens to all of us during these undifferentiated days and weeks of semi-quarantine.
But fear not, mis amigos! When a wine emergency strikes YOUR wine pantry, just click on the Order Wine link in the header above to browse our list of currently available wines with tasting notes and prices. When you have made your selections you can phone us with your order or email us using the Contact Us link above. We will confirm your order and make arrangements for pickup/delivery at your convenience. EZ-PZ!
ALSO, we are in the process of restocking some favorites and adding some new wines to our list, including several new Portuguese wines. Hope to get the list updated soon!
For the last couple of weeks at least some of us are feeling a modicum of increased Security. The incessant tinnitus tweetsteribus that has plagued our nation for the past five years has begun to fade. We can hear the wind again, and the rain on the roof. The crackle of the fire in the stove, and the snoring of the dog on his cushion. And the beginnings of…what is that feeling…ahh, yes, we begin to remember…intimations of what we used to call relaxation. Yes, we think, “more feelings like this one, please!”
At the same time, the relentless dissonance of the last four years lingers in our bodies as a fatigue, like the exhaustion one would feel after countless days in the desert, parched and directionless. Finally we have reached an oasis, but we will need time to regain our center. So it’s a good time to sit back and take stock.
On a decidedly positive note, the Mutiny has been quashed, at least for the moment; we have regained control of the Ship and placed reliable people in strategic positions who are reshaping priorities and policies by the hour. At the same time, due to the depth and breadth of betrayal in recent events, long-term investigations have been opened which may go on for some long time. For the moment we are left with questions about how we got here and what happens next. There follow a few insights from today’s readings.
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
Written some ten years ago about the rise of the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party after the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Funded by Republican business elites and reinforced by a network of conservative media sources including especially Fox News, the movement recruited people who were generally of middle age whose self-image was of having worked hard all their lives to achieve a modest sense of economic stability along with a resentment of people who, to them faced similar hardships but turned to government for handouts rather than work as they had done.
Curiously, as a group they are in favor of social security and medicare payments for people like them who worked hard all their lives, and were therefore deserving of such benefits. But they have deep resentment against perceived “handouts” to “undeserving” groups, the definition of which seems heavily influenced by racial and ethnic stereotypes. According to a CBS/New York Times national poll, 63 percent of Tea Party supporters regularly watch Fox News.
Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF)
This fund is a 501(c)(4) arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), most of whose members signed on to the lawsuit filed by the Texas AG to overturn the 2020 election. The organization played a major role in organizing the Capitol protest preceding the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The RLDF is a political organization to help elect Republican attorneys general and can accept unlimited contributions from wealthy individuals and corporations. Recent supporters include Koch Industries ($375k), Comcast Corporation ($200k), Walmart ($140k), Home Depot ($125k), Amazon ($100k), TikTok ($75k), 1-800 Contacts ($51k), Chevron ($50k), The National Rifle Association ($50k), Monsanto ($50k), Facebook ($50k), Fox Corporation ($50k), Uber ($50k), Coca Cola ($50k), Exxon ($50k), and Google ($25k).
How Inexperienced Candidates and Primary Challenges are Making Republicans The Protest Party
The GOP has become the more disruptive, volatile party in the last ten years. Since the 1994 Gingrich revolution, candidates with no political experience have more often defeated experienced candidates in Republican primaries than in Democratic primaries. That trend continued in 2016 and 2020, paving the way for today’s stripping of committee assignments from undisciplined Republican Representative Greene. As we have seen over the past four years, the rising stars of the Republican Party are consistently angry, dismissive, and personally insulting to their Democratic colleagues while offering little substantive argument to support particular positions. And these attitudes have in turn shaped the volatile new Republican coalition of racist white supremacists and evangelical Christians who consistently show little respect for the offices they hold or the responsibilities they bear.
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