lummi island wine tasting july 23 ’21
Current Hours: Friday & Saturday 4-6pm
We are still operating under reduced hours 4-6pm Friday and Saturday for wine tasting and sales. Covid vaccinations are required for admission upstairs in the tasting room, but unvaccinated guests are welcome to enjoy wine tasting outside on our entry deck.
Friday Bread This Week
Pear Buckwheat – Made with a a poolish pre-ferment of bread flour, water and a bit of yeast and fermented overnight. Mixed the next day with bread flour and fresh milled buckwheat. Since buckwheat has no gluten using the preferment allows the dough to begin to develop before the final mix. The addition of toasted walnuts and dried pears soaked in white wine makes for a really flavorful bread – $5/loaf
French Country Bread – A levain bread made with mostly bread flour, fresh milled whole wheat and and a bit of toasted wheat germ. After building the levain with a sourdough culture and mixing the final dough it gets a long cool overnight ferment in the refrigerator. This really allows the flavor to develop in this bread. Not a refined city baguette, but a rustic loaf that you would find in the countryside. A great all around bread –$5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Gibassiers – A traditional french pastry that incorporates the flavors from the south of 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
Wine of the Week: Ad Lucem Elaina Red ’16 Oregon $18
For those of you who never took Latin (it has turned out to be surprisingly useful over the years), the rough translation of “Ad Lucem” is “Toward the Light.” Its label is one of several used by Oregon wine industry pioneer Jerry Owen of Lady Hill winery, who was a founding partner in the well-respected Owen Roe winery in 1999 and numerous other wine ventures.
The Lady Hill Winery is across the road from Champoeg State Park in the northern Willamette Valley in Oregon, where his ancestors settled in 1850. We have made it something of a habit to visit the winery whenever we bivouac at this very pleasant State Park, and have found it a welcome destination with delicious wines and enjoyable conversations. Before Covid Jerry offered to drive up here some weekend and pour some of his wines for all of us, and we will keep trying to make that happen.
Ad Lucem is Lady Hill’s label for Rhone blends (any wines containing Grenache, Syrah, or Mourvedre), while Bordeaux reds (Cab Sauv, Cab Franc, Merlot, Malbec) bear the Lady Hill label, and rosés carry a Procedo label. Therefore, our featured wine this week is a blend of the three main Rhone varietals that has been making people smile for generations.
The Economics of the Heart: Lemming Lessons
The popular myth is that from time to time entire populations of little rodents called lemmings commit mass suicide by throwing themselves en masse off high cliffs into unsurvivable Northern Oceans. In reality, lemmings do indeed migrate in large numbers, particularly when their numbers strain the available food supply. And while that may involve swimming rivers, lakes, or ocean shorelines, they are very good swimmers.
Lemmings are creatures of the North. In winter, they create extensive networks of tunnels under snow and ice fields. Some winters, temperatures and humidity create ideal circumstances for them to thrive between the land and snow cover, and their numbers (mammals being what we are) can increase rapidly, triggering their instinct for some large subgroups to migrate in search of more favorable circumstances.
We old-timers – you know, So Old we took Latin in high school- were born into a world of about 2.5 billion human beings. Seven decades later, we live in a world with three times as many human beings, some 7.8 billion souls. Like lemmings, we all consume, eliminate, and reproduce. And like lemmings, when we have consumed, eliminated, and reproduced a place into economic uninhabitability, we migrate to where the grass is still green. That’s what living organisms do.
In just the last couple of months, we have had some alarming messages from our Planet that it’s time to send a big chunk of us on a migration for more space and more resources…but of course there is nowhere else for us to go. These alarms have included our region’s recent record-breaking heat wave; the increasing intensity of winds, rains, and flooding; the warming of ocean surface temperatures and slowing of climate-stabilizing currents like the Gulf Stream; the melting of polar icecaps; and the now-ongoing likelihood of extinction of millions of species. And if that isn’t scary enough, in a very short period of time these changes will become Irreversible.
Like lemmings, we have been very successful at blithely consuming the resources around us and enjoying an extraordinary 100-year population boom. Like lemmings we have expanded our exploitation of resources to meet our increasing numbers and frivolous desires. Unlike lemmings, we have done it on a scale which has created gigantic negative feedback loops which are eroding the Earth’s capacity to support Life of any kind for any species for very much longer.
In the midst of this very real Existential Crisis, we are baffled that so many of our fellow humans are mocking and ignoring these dangers and squandering the little time we have left in the name of extravagant political power.
This week’s $5 tasting:
Saint Nabor Gris de Gris Rose ’16 France $10
Bouquet of red fruit and honeysuckle with linden-tree nuances; light, crisp and easy drinking, with palate of wild strawberries and blueberries with mineral nuances.
Charles Krug Napa Valley Chardonnay ’17 Napa $18
The cool, foggy North Bay/Carneros region delivers a nice balance of acidity and ripeness, evoked nicely by barrel fermentation and sur lie aging, producing aromas of tropical fruit and citrus blossom with flavors of peach and pear.
Lady Hill Ad Lucem Elaina Red ’16 Washington $17
Grenache, syrah, mourvedre blend; aromas of toast, dark fruits and berries, and grilled meat that expand into mouth-watering rich flavors and crisp acidity on the palate.
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2072 Granger Way