lummi island wine tasting july 26-27 ’24
Hours, July 26-27 ’24
Friday 4-6 pm Saturday 3-5 pm
July morning backyard
Friday Bread This Week
Poolish Ale – The preferment here begins with a poolish made from bread flour, yeast, and ale and fermented overnight…then mixed the next day with bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat– a great all around bread with a nice crisp crust. – $5/loaf
Buckwheat Walnut & Honey – Also made with a poolish of fresh milled buckwheat and bread flours. 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, and has an earthy/nutty flavor. – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Morning Buns – Made popular by Tartine Bakery in San Francisco…mine are made with the same laminated dough as croissants. The dough is rolled out, spread with a filling of brown sugar, orange zest, butter and cinnamon, rolled up and sliced before baking. 2/$5
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday Janice emails the week’s bread offering to her mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday 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 at least a week before visiting!
This week’s wine tasting
Vielle Ferme Blanc ’23 France $12
Flavorful blend of bourboulenc, grenache blanc, roussanne, ugni blanc, & vermentino delivering seductive aromas of jasmine, hawthorn, and pear with flavors of blood orange with delicate saline notes.
La Quercia Montepulciano d’Abruzzo Riserva ’17 Italy $19
From 50-yr-old vines; rich, full-bodied and rustic in expression, with rich notes of cocoa, rhubarb, blackberry, and herbs; long, lingering finish of juicy black cherry, with a silky/velvety mouthfeel.
Domaine Chibaou Surnaturel Merlot ’22 France $25
Complex nose of black fruits, candied strawberries and caramel; round, rich and concentrated, balanced, with good length in the mouth. No sulfites.
Wine of the Week: La Quercia Montepulciano d’Abruzzo Riserva ’17 Italy $19
https://www.summerinitaly.com/guide/la-quercia-winery
We buy many of our Italian wines from our friends at Small Vineyards, an importer in West Seattle with family ties to Lummi Island. This wine is particularly special, and we are down to the last few bottles until our next shipment in the late fall. This is a big wine with lots of character and flavor. The importer describes the winemaker as follows:
A “true blue,” grizzled farmer-type, winemaker Antonio Lamona is both utterly likeable and totally invested in his wines. Although his father also grew grapes, Antonio is the first in the family to bottle his own and, beginning in the late sixties, began cultivating vines that are entirely organic. As Antonio says, “I would rather forgo an entire vintage than put man-made pesticides in my soil.”
Ownership of La Quercia is shared with three of his lifelong friends – it’s a gorgeous, rustic estate in a tiny Adriatic town where sea, sun and wind abound. The farm is entirely self-sustaining: they produce their own salami, bread, vegetables, olive oil, and cheeses. Regardless of what may be happening elsewhere in Italy, Antonio’s estate remains steadfast, renowned for its consistency in terms of both style and quality from one vintage to the next.” read more
Economics of the Heart: The Game is Afoot…!
As we have all seen, the response to Uncle Joe’s decision not to run has been surprisingly electric, evoking $millions in campaign donations to VP Harris and tens of thousands of new voter registrations, particularly in the 25-35 age group. The mood is ebullient across the nation in support of Biden’s decision and of Harris’ rapid collection of enough convention votes to clinch her candidacy.
Meanwhile, the Maga Party has been caught flat-footed by Biden’s decision just days after celebrating their Tweetster/Vance ticket and their Project 2025 commitment to shredding the Constitution, eliminating women’s rights, voting rights, immigrant rights, color of skin rights. Not to mention ignoring Climate Change, crushing Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and more while transferring wealth and opportunity from everyone who needs it to the top 1% who don’t but feel entitled to it. Make no mistake; theirs is a Dark Dystopian vision in every sense of the world, deliberately centered around their frightening vision of making our country a totalitarian, white, male, Christian, and planet-killing hell.
Political writer Thomas Friedman just posted this view of the strangeness of this present moment in our history. Democrats are energized, engaged, organized, ad excited about possiblities, a mood in stark contrast to the recent chaotic Republican convention, which deliberately (again) had no party platform except to take rights away from women, immigrants, elders, the sick, the poor. (…you know, the tired and hungry masses that seek the same freedom and opportunity that most of our ancestors sought when they came to this country.)
As Friedman suggests, this pivotal Campaign has begun in earnest with one side cheering opportunity, inclusion, freedom, and unity for all while the other claims boundless opportunity for the Few and smug indifference to the needs of the many.
It’s a promising starrt!
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