lummi island wine tasting march 29-30 ’24
Hours this week…
Friday 4-6 pm Saturday 3-5 pm
more signs of Spring…ahhhh
This week’s wine tasting
We are trying something new this weekend that we hope will be fun and interesting: six wines we are sampling from Cinder Winery in Idaho. This came about after new friend of the wine shop Tom B, a club member there, shared some recent arrivals with us and everyone found them tasty! The winery sent us one each of six different wines, so we will pour three on Friday and 3 on Saturday:
Friday:
Cinder Dry Viognier ’22 Aromas of lemon gelato and jasmine, vibrant citrus, enduring fruity finish, and well-rounded structure.
Cinder Malbec ’20 Notes of white tea and bing cherry, robust red fruit flavors w/hints of leather, juniper, cranberry and cinnamon.
Cinder Syrah ’22 Boysenberry and vanilla aromas, palate of toasted peppercorn, fresh blackberries, silky finish w/hints of molasses and smoked meats.
Saturday:
- Cinder Rosé of Cinsault ’22 Delicately nuanced color with floral, citrus, and honeydew melon aromas; light palate of red fruit, lemon balm notes & crisp finish.
- Cinder Valentina ’21 Cab, Merlot, Malbec; Aromas and flavors of bing cherry, espresso bean, vanilla, & thyme; medium bodied with a smooth, rich texture.
- Cinder Rowen ’21 Syrah, Mourvedre, Cinsault blend; Aromas and flavors of sour cherry, tart plum, crushed herbs & tobacco, with bright, long finish.
Friday Bread This Week
Italian Breakfast Bread – A sweetly delicious bread! Made with bread flour, eggs, yogurt, a little sugar and vanilla, with dried cranberries, golden raisins, and candied lemon peel. Perfect for breakfast toast or how about some Easter morning French Toast!? – $5/loaf
Colomba di Pasqua (aka ‘Easter Dove’): A traditional Italian Easter cake similar to Christmas panettone. Made with a sweet Italian levain, known as a lievito madre, kept at a warm temperature for a sweet, cake-like dough rather than a sour one. Contains plenty of eggs, sugar and butter plus fresh and candied orange peel, topped with a crunchy almond/hazelnut glaze and pearl sugar before baking in a dove-shaped baking form as labor of love Easter dove! – $10/loaf
Hot Cross Buns – Uses an enriched dough with plenty of butter, sugar and eggs, with lots of of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger, balancing plenty of currants, and candied lemon, and orange peel, and topped with a flavorful paste. 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.
Economics of the Heart: Taking Bearings
Dorothea Lange: Children of Oklahoma drought refugee in migratory camp in California, 1936
Right here, right now, across our country and around the world, the combination of an ever-expanding global population and the accelerating infrastructure destruction from floods, fires, famines, and wars overlapping across the planet from climate change is creating costs faster and larger than human civilization seems willing to recognize and address. Things are falling apart faster and on such an accelerating global scale that our collective abilities, will, intelligence, and commitment seem increasingly unlikely to save either ourselves or our planet from annihilation of our own making.
Here we are in 2024, after some Five Decades of concurring research findings about the existential threat posed by global warming, and still we are being stonewalled by deliberate long-term corporate denial (“Greenwashing is our most important product!”), and not until very recently has a significant proportion of our population been waking up to the magnitude and immediacy of these massive, overlapping, and interlinked existential threats.
It should not be lost on anyone that right here in our own country, for the last fifty years one entire political party has based its entire “platform” on being avidly in favor of anything that increased short-term corporate profits, executive salaries, and stock prices, and equally against taxing big business or the billionaire owners and executives who own them, and at the same time increasing taxes and decreasing benefits for a struggling middle class and the perennially poor. This “Robber Baron” philosophy goes back to the Industrial Revolution in England, where an old cartoon of two top-hatted gentlemen on an evening stroll along dirty streets bordering giant industrial smokestacks agreed, “There is a Great Deal of Money to be made here.”
These attitudes have been the essential Republican platform since at least 1970: “rob the poor to help the rich.” Well, the good news is that that Republican party no longer seems to exist, having now morphed into two related entities. The first and most obvious is the Tweetster’s Maga party of suckers who still think he gives a fig about them or their problems.
The second seems to have been the even more dangerous driving force behind the Tweetster’s original candidacy and its likely “steal” of the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. It by far the more dangerous, the shadowed Overlord of the Tweetster and his flunkies, a massively well-funded marriage of corporatists, fascists, and religious fundamentalists. They are not the Tweetster’s pawn; it’s the other way around, and he has no idea.
It is their platform the Tweetster has been openly touting, including doing away with the Constitution, freedom of religion, women’s rights, and environmental protections. On an international scale it seems inclined toward global domination by a strange dystopian melange of corporate hierarchy, Christian fundamentalism, and authoritarian control of everyone and everything. It would not only dismantle the United States. It would do away with “countries” altogether by making them individual Industrial Departments with their own Board-chosen Chairs– a unified global industrial network that makes its own rules for its own aims for its own reasons. And completely without mercy.
This kind of fantasy organization was at the center of the 1975 sci-fi fantasy film Rollerball, starring James Caan and John Houseman. This little chat between global hero Caan and one of a small elite of global industrial executives Houseman is one version of what we are talking about. These people may not be so much “pro-Putin” as they are some new kind of authoritarian organization in which the “workers” are completely expendable and the only goal is the maximization of profit and personal power for a very small elite.
In such a possible world (and many others), there is likely no concern at all about climate change. Its disasters, famines, wars, and destruction will cause billions of people to die in local battles for scraps, from starvation, thirst, or exposure; or simply because there is no profit in their existence. The Executives will inherit the Earth, or what’s left of it.
It’s not personal. It’s just, you know, business.
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2072 Granger Way