lummi island wine tasting feb 9 ’24
Friday, Feb 9, 4-6pm
Open for wine tasting, sales, and bread order pickup
Padilla Bay reflection…
This week’s wine tasting
Adroît Orange Ribolla Gialla California ’21 Lodi $23
Clusters were hand-sorted and fermented on the lees prior to a gentle pressing, aged on fine lees for 11 months, then racked and bottled unfined and unfiltered.
Riebeek Pinotage South Africa $14
Cold soaked overnight and fermented on the lees in 80% French and 20% American oak, and blended with unoaked wine to enhance fresh fruity flavors.
Rocks of Bawn Shafts and Furrow Red ’20 $18 Washington $18
88% Merlot from Frenchman Hills Vineyard (south-facing & high elevation); 12 % Merlot from Southwind Vineyard in Walla Walla (full-bodied and rich); 6% Cab Sauv from Red Mountain & Horse Heaven Hills; and 4% Cab Franc from the iconic Red Willow Vineyard in Yakima Valley; and a spicy 2% Malbec.
Friday Bread Pickup This Week
Whole Wheat Levain – Begins with a sourdouinal mixing of the dough- which is then fermented overnight in the refrigerator. This long slow process allows the fermentation process to start and the gluten to start developing. About 25% fresh milled whole wheat, a ‘toothy’ crumb, great texture and flavor and a nice crisp crust. – $5/loaf
Semolina Levain – Semolina is made from durum wheat, which is a hard wheat and often used in pasta. The flour has a lovely golden color that comes through in the bread. Uses a sourdough starter/levain that ferments overnight before mixing the final dough with bread flour, semolina and fresh milled whole wheat and little butter for a soft crumb. Makes great toast! – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Gibassiers – A traditional french pastry recipe from southern France. Made with a delicious sweet dough full of milk, butter, eggs and olive oil. The addition of orange flower water, candied orange peel and anise seed bring great flavor to these pastries. After baking they are brushed with melted butter and sprinkled with more sugar. Ooh La La a delightful pastry to go along with your morning coffee or tea! – 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.
Economics of the Heart: Invasion of the Zombie Republicans
“File:I Like Ike button, 1952.png” by Tyrol5 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
My first memories are of moving from a home I don’t remember when I was about three and sort of “coming on line” as we (mother, father, older sister, & I ) were en route from New Jersey, where I was born, to Maine, where my mother grew up. So first memory is of waking up in a jumble of blankets, clothes, lots of people talking at what turned out to be my Polish grandparents’ home in Hartford.
My second memory is standing of on the tarmac at Hartford airport walking out to a 2-engine airplane with a tail wheel (a DC-3), which we boarded. The third memory is the changing engine sounds on the flight from the changing pitch of the propeller blades between waaaa to wohhh and back. And the fourth memory is looking out the window as the plane was landing in Boston and seeing the boats right below us and yelling something about wanting to play with the boats. So even very young children pay more attention to their surroundings when stimulated by the constant newness of travel experience. What are your earliest memories…?
Anyway… we had been living in the same house in Bangor long enough to make it feel like home when my father (almost always gone when I was awake) left quite suddenly during a shouting argument with my mother. (Picture Jack Paar walking off the stage in the middle of his TV show.) In June, 1952 he came back to visit, and took my sister and me to his parents’ house in Hartford, about a 10-hour drive in those days, where we started school and remained until late Fall, closely monitored and cared for by Nana. By late fall my mother had filed for divorce, drove down with a friend, and took us home.
The point of this little vignette is that again traveling made everything new and memorable. It was also an election year that summer in Hartford, and Everybody Liked Ike! There were posters and loudspeaker trucks everywhere, blaring slogans. Ike was President till I was in high school. He was kindly, credible, serious. And back in those days Maine Republicans were often more liberal than many Democrats. Like Margaret Chase Smith. It was a good place to be.
In the sixties all of that started changing. The JFK years were both magical (Camelot!) and heart-breaking. LBJ picked up the banners of civil rights and going to the Moon and ran with them, while the Vietnam war brewed major divisions across the nation. Right and Left became blurred on many issues, and violence erupted about the war, segregation, and protests. There were more assassinations: Bobby, Martin, others. And Nixon became President in the middle of all of this under the auspices of “ending the war.”
Nixon, who had been Ike’s VP, did accomplish some valuable things, including connecting with China, starting the EPA, establishing Earth Day, and passing the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, and Title IX. He appointed four pretty good Supreme Court Justices to the Court that later decided Roe v. Wade.
At the same time, his VP Spiro Agnew and others in his administration were starting to lean further Right, while he dabbled in his own vain illegalities that brought him down. As we discussed recently, these are the same forces that in 1973 made over the fringy John Birch Society into the extremely polished and well-funded Heritage Foundation, a good marker for the beginning of the no-holds-barred, corporate-powered takeover of the Republican Party by mega-wealthy, ego-centric, self-entitled white men with thin skins.
Or, as the old cartoon has it:
“Mommy, is it true that Republicans have hearts of Stone…?”
“No, dear, it’s not…Republicans don’t have hearts.
As mentioned in that same post, by 1980 the HF had become so well-funded that its “think tank” had produced the first of many 20-volume manifestos for the corporatization of American institutions, which Reagan adopted lock, stock, and barrel, passing into law thousands of “conservative” new laws and accelerating the transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to those who were already billionaires.
Perhaps the most insidious of those rules was doing away with FCC rules which required “balanced reporting” on political or controversial issues. Almost overnight, the rules of civil discourse were freed from fact-based reporting and opened to any form or lying, hyperbole, personal insult, and political slander. Numerous new networks jumped into the game, with countless well-funded propaganda broadcasts 24/7, all of them lying, hyping, arousing anger, fear, distrust of our institutions, and slandering all things Democratic, egalitarian, kind, compassionate, foreign, “unwhite,” “unChristian,” regulatory, or fair.
That was just the beginning…!
to be continued…
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2072 Granger Way