lummi island wine tasting march 31 ’23
Hours this weekend: 4-6 pm Friday
NO Bread Pickup This Week…it’s Annual Roadside Pickup!
Each year around the first weekend of April is the annual Roadside Cleanup. Volunteers gather at the Grange around 0930 and have a little time to socialize and enjoy one of the pastries Janice makes for the event.
Then crews form, climb into pickups, ride to their assigned stretch of road, and walk both sides to pick up any litter that has accumulated during the year before returning to base to unload, show off most amazing junk found, and enjoy the well-earned hot dogs!
To get on the bread order list, click on the “Contact Us” link above and fill out the form. Each 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.
Wine of the Week: Juggernaut Russian River Pinot Noir ’20 Sonoma $17
Notes: Cool breezes and damp fog build character in this Russian River pinot noir; graceful and vigorous, aromas of white flowers, vanilla bean, and waffle cone open to persistent flavors of dark cherry and red berries with spicy floral notes.
The Bogle winery– group of wineries these days– is a stone’s throw west of the Sacramento River, and about equidistant from Sacramento and Lodi. Bogle is a big outfit, with 2000 acres of vineyards and a family of wine labels, and local roots tracing back to a Civil War vet and his nephew who moved to the area in the 1870’s and planted orchards which they lost during the Depression and became tenant farmers in nearby Clarksville.
After WWII a family member was able to buy a small holding in the same area, and for twenty years did well growing market crops like wheat and corn. The family planted their first vineyards in the late 60’s, and sold the fruit to existing wineries as the vines matured. Their first wine under the family name was released in the late 70’s.
These days they have a handful of labels: Bogle, Twenty Acres, Phantom, Juggernaut, Tanist, Dark Watchers. The “Juggernaut” series has eye-catching, creative, elaborate, and Scary labels. The cab has a very elaborate and scary lion. (watch it develop..!)
This Week’s $10 Wine Tasting:
Juggernaut Chardonnay ’21 Sonoma $17
Aromas of apple, Asian pear and lemon meringue open to flavors of stone fruit, honeysuckle and yellow plum made rich and lingering using barrel fermentation and sur lie aging; finishes with notes of vanilla bean, and butter cream with hints of baking spices and clove.
Argento Malbec ’20 Argentina $12
From organically grown grapes; deep purple hue; inviting aromas of red berries and flowers, and flavors of plum and sweet blackberry; finishes with ripe, balanced tannins– way over-delivers for its modest price.
Juggernaut Russian River Pinot Noir ’20 Sonoma
Cool breezes and damp fog build character in this Russian River pinot noir; graceful and vigorous, aromas of white flowers, vanilla bean, and waffle cone open to persistent flavors of dark cherry and red berries with spicy floral notes.
Economics of the Heart: Blood From Stones
courtesy www.silverenchantments.com
There are many well-known and well-used metaphors for it: getting blood out of a stone; robbing Peter to pay Paul; easier said than done; have your cake and eat it— the list goes on and on. All these phrases are acknowledgements of the basic economic reality of living beings: we must continually extract resources from and return waste to the same interdependent– and finite –– environment, and that requires that we all agree to a common set of shared values and a set of rules for resource allocation and behavior.
Some things can be shared, others not so much. Who gets how much of what? How is it decided? In a world of scarcity everything has elements of mine, yours, ours, and theirs that are the stuff of conflict and compromise, politics and power. This is the actual, physical, moment to moment challenge of our shared economic reality: to come up with a sustainable set of rules that we can all endorse, believe in, and support.
Trust in and commitment to a shared set values and rules is a necessary condition for the ongoing mutual trust and comity that hold an economic system together. We have seen many signs over the past decade that commitments to democracy, freedom, and fairness have been eroding both globally and within our own country. These serious political divisions are creating and maintaining stress and tension we can all feel, regardless of our politics.
Locally, though, we expect things to work differently. We feel a sense of belonging here on our little island, in our nearby mainland communities, and even our State. It’s a very good place to be, and we have grown used to a sense of mutual support and rapport with our local government agents and agencies.
So it has been challenging recently to find ourselves clashing with recent County efforts to redefine its relationship to our community from a sense of partnership to one of scapegoating and punishment. The situation is challenging in that many elements of our 60-yr old ferry and supporting infrastructure are are at the end of their useful lives and require continuing investment to keep them operational for another four or five years until a planned new vessel enters service.
Under current statute, such extraordinary expenses certainly do not qualify as the “regular and routine” maintenance expenses of which 55% must be paid for from ferry fare revenues. The statute is a compact between ferry users and the rest of the County; users pay 55% of the “regular and routine” expenses, and the County pays 45% of ops expenses (of which half are subsidized by the State) and all of capital costs, which get written off as depreciation.
But in recent months all of that has changed. The County now proposes to drop the current statute entirely and redefine operating costs as “any expense that isn’t specifically defined as a “capital expense,” in the same breath as they define “repairs” as anything they say it is. (no, we are not making this up!) It’s a breach of faith and trust and an unacceptable shifting of additional financial burden away from the 240,000 county residents to the 1000 island residents.
Basic fare economics tells us that people respond to large fare increases by making fewer trips, moving away, working more from home, or otherwise economizing on ferry travel, even moving to the mainland. Those demographic changes not only have a negative effect on our community diversity; they also will lower overall fare revenue because the people who make the most trips will leave and be replaced by more retirees and telecommuters who can ride the ferry once a week or less.
This latest proposal qualifies as a great example of an economic “Dumb Cycle:”
REVENUE DROPS –> RAISE FARES –>
RAISE FARES –> RIDERSHIP FALLS –>
RIDERSHIP FALLS –> REVENUE DROPS –> around and around and around….
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2072 Granger Way