lummi island wine tasting june 11 ’21
Bread This Week
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.
Seeded Multi Grain Levain – Made with a sourdough culture and using a flavorful mix of bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat and rye. A nice mixture of flax, sesame sunflower and pumpkin seeds and some oatmeal adds great flavor and crunch. And just a little honey for some sweetness. A great all around bread that is full of flavor – $5/loaf
Polenta Levain – Also made with a levain in which the sourdough starter is fed and built up over several days, then mixed with bread flour and polenta in the final dough mix. This is not the sweet corn cranberry bread that I have done in the past that is enriched with milk and butter, this bread is a nice rustic loaf with great corn flavor. – 5/loaf…
and pastry this week…
Brioche Suisse- A rich brioche dough made with plenty of butter, eggs and sugar, rolled out and spread with pastry cream before sprinkling with dark chocolate. The dough is folded over all that delicious filling and cut into individual pieces. 2/$5
Wine of the Week: Willamette Valley Vineyards Estate Pinot Noir ’18
Aromas of raspberry, blackberry, currant, earth, dried herbs and roses, with full-bodied palate of cherry, bramble fruit, cedar, anise and minerality; silky mouthfeel and flavors, with exceptional balance of velvety tannins, lifting acidity, and a lingering finish.
Objectively speaking, during our tasting Judy (our island wine professional) didn’t care for it particularly (usually we agree). But there is an elusive quality– part of it is a background nose of fresh roses– that is hard to define, but it does have a certain draw. See what you think!
RAF Mildenhall
Yesterday President Biden gave his first address to our European Allies at the RAF Mildenhall air base, located about 80 miles northeast of London. The base first became an airfield in the 1920’s, very early days in the game of aviation.
It then became a key base for bombers during WWII, and after the war it became primarily a base for in-flight refueling tankers and transport aircraft in collaboration with the US Air Force. For some years during the Cold War it also was a primary base for the long-range, high altitude reconnaissance aircraft (“spy planes”) the U-2 and the SR-71 during the Cold War.
As it turns out, I spent several days at Mildenhall back in 1967, just after graduation from the Naval Academy as a new Ensign. I had been corresponding with a girl I had met in Copenhagen during a training cruise in 1964 (see photo, left). By 1967 she was working in London as an au pair, so before reporting to my first duty station, I caught a hop to England from Dover AFB in Delaware for a visit. By day I was a tourist on my own in London, and in the evenings we would meet up with an eclectic group of her international friends for food, conversation, and entertainment.
After most of a week in London, I took the train back across the countryside to Mildenhall to wait for a flight back home (about three days). In those days Mildenhall was much as it must have been during the War…small, tidy, friendly, easy-going. The accommodations and food were entirely pleasant, and there were trees and lawns, and I had enough time on my hands to read most of Dr. Zhivago. All of which is to say that Mildenhall represents a pretty comfortable set of memories and associations, and to my knowledge I have not seen or heard the name mentioned for a very long time. Have you ever heard of it before?
Economics of the Heart: Renewing Alliances for the Future
In 1939 at the very beginning of WWII, the movie The Lion Has Wings was released by the Brits to stir national support for the coming war effort. Back then, the Nazis had built a formidable war machine and gave every sign of intending to deploy it against the rest of Europe. Fascist dictators had taken over Germany, Italy, and Spain, and Stalin had not been an ally. Whatever hopes anyone had that Hitler would not use his arsenal against other European countries was dashed to pieces when he invaded Poland and put it firmly under the Nazi heel.
The history of American alliances with nations in Europe is largely a history of providing a common defense against the Hitlers of the world. President Biden is on a mission to repair and renew the apparatus of common defense as authoritarianism is on the rise around the world and even here in our own country as Red states rush to enact an orgy of voter suppression laws before the 2022 Congressional election.
At the same time, the common habits of humanity of irresponsible procreation, production, pollution, exploitation, acquisition, and hubris are relentlessly shredding the interwoven fabric that makes existence even possible on our tiny, isolated, and increasingly beleaguered planet.
We applaud Mr. Biden’s understanding of the gravity of this present moment in the history of life on Earth, and his efforts to unite us to save it from our collective hubris.
Another way of looking at this is that some humans are like chimps, and some like bonobos. Chimps have a mean streak, and every once in while the dominant males cross into another tribe’s territory and stomp one of the Others to death. Bonobos don’t work like that, probably because they spend a lot more time making whoopee. Or, as Margaret Mead found in her research, the level of violence in a culture was most explained by the amount of physical contact with infants (more touching–> less violence), and the age of consent for sex (younger age –> less violent).
This week’s $5 wine tasting
K Vintners Art Den Hoed Viognier ’18 Washington $22
Medium gold hue and beautiful notes of orange blossom, ripe peach, and a touch of quince; density and richness reminiscent of southern Rhone style; full-bodied with a solid center palate and a long, flavorful finish.
UDACA Eloquente Dao Tinto ’18 Portugal $9
Touriga Nacional, Tinta Roriz, Jaen, and Alfrocheiro Pret; rich and intense, with clear ruby color, clean aromas of red and ripe fruits; soft, balanced flavor, and a lingering finish.
Willamette Valley Vineyards Estate Pinot Noir ’18 Oregon $28
Aromas of raspberry, blackberry, currant, earth, dried herbs and roses, with full-bodied palate of cherry, bramble fruit, cedar, anise and minerality; silky mouthfeel and flavors, with exceptional baance of velvety tannins, lifting acidity, and a lingering finish.
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