lummi island wine tasting jan12 ’24
HOURS for January, 2024
Current plans are for bread pickup to every other week until further notice.
Friday, Jan 12, 4-6pm: Open for wine tasting, sales, and bread pickup; SPECIAL NOTE: DUE TO VERY COLD WEATHER, BREAD PICKUP FROM 4-5 pm ONLY
Friday, Jan 19, 4-6pm: Open for wine tasting & sales only (no bread)
Friday, Jan 26, 4-6pm: Open for wine tasting, sales, and bread order pickup
This week’s wine tasting: hearty wines to keep you warm durin’ the Nor’eastuh
Phantom Chardonnay ’21 California $16
Entices with rich layers of green apple and pear that lead into spicy flavors of freshly baked apple pie, while barrel fermentation imparts a creamy, luscious mouthfeel finishing with sweet notes of vanilla and melted caramel. (especially soothing at room temperature! )
Jordanov Vranec ’20 Macedonia $12
Aromas of ripe berries with notes of clove, nutmeg and cardamom. In the mouth it is full bodied with ripe dark fruit and hints of herbs with a noticeable dark chocolate edge on the well-structured finish. Enjoy with cheese, beef, lamb dishes or grilled sausage.
MAN Vintners Pinotage ’20 South Africa $12
Aromas of dark coffee beans, red berries, nutmeg, and vanilla spice turning to dark berries and smoky plum; rustic yet silky and juicy, with smooth tannins, balanced acidity, and comforting intensity.
Taylor Fladgate 10 yr Tawny Port Portugal $28
Deep brick color with amber rim; rich, elegant nose of ripe berries with a delicate nuttiness and subtle notes of chocolate, butterscotch and fine oak; smooth and silky on the palate with persisting ripe, figgy, jammy flavors on the long finish.
Friday Bread Pickup This Week: 4-5pm only due to freezing weather!
Pain Meunier -aka “Miller’s Bread”— made with pre-fermented dough 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 – aka Sunflower Seed Bread– made with a pre-ferment that is a complete dough itself. It takes a portion of the flour, water, salt and yeast that ferments overnight before mixing the final dough, 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
Fruit & Spice Rolls – Not as rich and sweet as many of our pastry choices, with almost half whole wheat but still have plenty of butter, and sugar add flavor and a tender crumb, along with dried cranberries, golden raisins, and fresh orange peel/juice with anise, cinnamon, mace, and cardamon and topped with demerara sugar before baking for that extra bit of sweetness and crunch. 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.
Lummi Island Wild Canned Pink Salmon
As all of our locals know, one of the many blessings of living here is the annual late summer reefnet fishery in Legoe Bay. Though for many years it has been a mere shadow of the incredible harvests of the past as migrating salmon (silver, chinook, coho, sockeye, chum, pink) swam by on their way to spawn in upper reaches of the Nooksack and Fraser Rivers.
Nowadays the entire life cycle of anadromous fish (that return from the ocean to spawn in the fresh water rivers and streams where they were hatched) is under duress from climate change as well as from many decades of systematic over-fishing, pollution, and dams.
Given all of that, the Lummi Island reefnet fishery is a special gem, using ancient techniques and modern gear to catch a small number of migrating fish each fall in a way that preserves their quality and the ability of the stock to spawn and reproduce.
No doubt many of you have taken advantage of this year’s local catch at the Beach Store Cafe and/or the Reef Net trailer parked regularly by the Islander store. For several month now they have been serving fish and chips using reef-net caught salmon, particularly pinks . It is soooo good!
And now it is available in cans right here at the wine shop, right next to our stock of LI Wild canned albacore tuna, both almost certainly the best you have ever had!
The Economics of the Heart: Encore– Our Ongoing Civil War
Cincinnati – Spring Grove Cemetery & Arboretum ‘Sentinel at Sunset – Civil War Section’
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Every once in a while we read something that unexpectedly pulls several seemingly unrelated issues into such a compelling systemic context that we have something of a “Eureka!” moment. That happened this week while reading an interview from last March with Barbara Walter, a political scientist at UCSD, who recently published a fascinating and timely book: How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.
Over the decades political scientists have collected lots of data about revolutions and tested lots of models in search of a set of variables that could best predict them. In 1994 the CIA started a think tank called the Political Instability Task Force to identify effective metrics to assess a society’s likelihood of civil war. Over time the group has examined some 250 historical instances of acute instability between 1955 and 2002, assessed some thirty different factors as possible predictors, and found only two that had significant predictive value.
The first factor is a nation’s degree of anocracy, its tendency to be autocratic or democratic. Scores ranged from -10 for a completely autocratic state like North Korea to +10 for a completely democratic state like Denmark or Canada. Most countries are somewhere in between. The US is currently at a +5, down from the +10 it had enjoyed since the scale was invented. Countries in the ambiguous zone between -5 and +5 have significant and conflicting elements of both and are therefore considered at higher risk for revolution than either stable democracies or stable autocracies.
The second factor is whether the current dominant organizing principle in the society is based on ideology (values) or identity (religion, ethnicity, race). While ideological differences lend themselves well to democratic compromise, identity differences are much more likely to lead to animosity, tribalism, and even civil war.
In the interview Professor Walter relates a story of how her father, a young German boy during the Nazi years, before emigrating to the US in the 50’s, became very agitated about the Trump candidacy and election in 2016, seeing in his politics many parallels to the Nazi brown-shirts of his childhood: twisting facts, denigrating minorities and immigrants, and undermining dissent.
There have always been political differences in American politics, but compromises have led to deals, public business has been conducted, and the government has been stable. The eye-opening takeaway from the author’s observations is that the political battle that has been going on in our country since about 1992 has never been just a simple clash of liberal and conservative values. It began in the 90’s with Gingrich’s open warfare against the Clinton White House in particular and Congressional Democrats in general. It started becoming less and less about ideas and values and more and more about identity.
That was accelerated by populist response to the Obama Presidency, which in turn led to the election of some 87 “Tea Party” Republicans in 2010 who espoused the extreme views of the Koch brothers and its lobbying arm ALEC. Most of them came from such heavily gerrymandered conservative districts they were largely guaranteed election, unless they lost a primary to a candidate further to their Right. With no incentive to move toward the center for reelection, they have have increasingly refused to compromise on any issue rather than give Democrats a “win” on anything– quite willing to let their constituents suffer rather than compromise.
It is difficult to see anything positive coming from the increased militancy of the Right, spotlighted spectacularly by the recent authoritarian Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and to forbid the EPA from regulating carbon emissions. Our nation seems to be nearing a turning point: The party’s long-term viability may be in doubt if a strategy of mindless, implacable obstruction endangers the stability and prosperity of the country, causing too many voters to consider it an existential threat. Cynical political realism, if nothing else, suggests that the Republican Party can’t carry on forever as a permanent revolution. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/12/04/tea-party-trumpism-conservatives-populism/)
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2072 Granger Way