lummi island wine tasting april 29 ’22
May Schedule
We will be OPEN for wine tasting and sales this Friday and Saturday from 4-6 pm. Anyone with boosted vaccine status is welcome!
NOTE: We will be CLOSED during Ferry drydock, reopening May 27-28 for Memorial Day weekend. We regret any inconvenience.
Bread Pickup This Week
Four Seed Buttermilk – This bread includes all the elements of whole wheat, but does so separately by adding cracked wheat and bran in to the bread flour instead of milling whole wheat berries. It also has buttermilk and oil which will make for a tender bread as well as adding a little tang. Finally it is finished with with a bit of honey and sunflower pumpkin and sesame seeds and some toasted millet – $5/loaf
Fig Anise – One of the more popular breads in the rotation. Made with a sponge that is fermented overnight, then the final dough is mixed with bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat. Honey, dried figs and anise bring in all the flavors of the mediterranean. – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Black Sesame & Candied Lemon Brioche: A delicious brioche dough full of eggs, butter and sugar. Filled with fresh lemon zest and candied lemon and as if that wasn’t enough, topped with a black sesame streusel before baking. Ooh la la, what’s not to like. I can only make a limited number so be sure to get your order in early. – 2/$5
To get on the bread order list, click on the “Contact Us” link above and fill out the form. The week’s bread menu is sent to the list each Sunday, for ordering by Tuesday, for pickup on Friday. Simple, right..? If you will be visiting the island and would like to order bread for your visit, at least a week’s notice is recommended for pickup the following Friday.
This Week’s $5 Tasting
Sea Sun Chardonnay ’20 California $19
Bright nose of mango, butterscotch, apple, and pineapple; round and creamy texture, with notes of lemon curd and a spicy, toasty quality, with hints of cinnamon and lemon curd.
Maryhill Winemaker’s Red ’19 Washington $13
Ripe black fruit notes and a hint of fresh flowers are well backed by leather and cedar wood. Maple bar and black fruit of currant and blackberry appear on entry, with a mid-palate of rich tannins and a smooth finish.
Marchetti Villa Bonomi Conero Riserva ’17 Italy $27
100% Sangiovese from Montepulciano, aged 16 mos. in barriques and 12 mos. in bottle; shows intense floral bouquet, intense, nuanced flavors; ripe, pleasing tannins, and satisfying finish.
The Economics of the Heart: Economics and Engineering
Back a few careers ago I would occasionally be in a conversation with a student about choosing a major. Traditionally such a conversation invariably got tied to “What kind of work do you want to do?” But my feeling was always more like, “What kind of people do you admire and want to be like?” Go hang out with some biologists, or engineers, or artists, or whatever. What do they talk about? What do they care about? What do they value? What do you value?
Every discipline has its own world view, highlighting and exploring certain kinds of relationships among things and people, ignoring or discounting others. If we could crawl inside someone else’s head, as in the strange film “Being John Malkovich, we would experience a completely different world, with its own language, vocabulary, points of view, procedures, rules, and nuances.
By training I learned to think like an engineer and like an economist. And at the moment, as a new member of LIFAC (Lummi Island Ferry Advisory Committee), I am seeing some tension between these two ways of thinking in our ferry design and acquisition process. Engineers think about things like materials, energy requirements, redundancy, reliability, maintenance, power, longevity, efficiency. Economists think about things like value, satisfaction, costs, benefits, scale, tradeoffs, and yes, efficiency.
So efficiency is a common thread. In engineering it is getting the most work from a BTU of energy. In economics it is getting the greatest net benefit from each unit of a resource. At present we are at about Year 4 in planning for a replacement ferry for our 60 yr-old Whatcom Chief. The engineers have from the beginning steered us toward a 34-car vessel to replace our old 16-car vessel that regularly crams on up to 20 cars. This is how engineers think: “two backups for every alternate system.” There is some merit to that approach.
On one of the many “other hands,” we now live in a completely different world than humans have ever experienced. Because of climate change, all we know about the future is that it has no precedent in our history; it will NOT be like the past; and our prospects for even basic survival will keep getting worse faster and faster every day until we get our collective energy use back to pre-industrial levels.
My inner engineer and inner economist have been conferring about this for a few years now. At present the data are saying there are a lot of economic arguments for why a smaller vessel (22-26 cars) would yield the greatest net benefits.
You can read one of them here.
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2072 Granger Way