lummi island wine tasting nov 22-23

Posted at November 21, 2024

Wine Tasting hours through December

 

 

 

 

Friday Bread This Week

Rosemary Olive Oil – made with bread flour and freshly milled white whole wheat for additional flavor and texture. Fresh rosemary from the garden and olive oil make for a nice tender crumb and crisp crust.  – $5/loaf

Flax Seed Currant Ciabatta – Made with an overnight poolish that ferments some of the flour and water before being mixed with bread flour, whole wheat, and rye flours,  flax seeds, and dried currants. A lot of water makes for a very slack dough that is just cut into pieces, for a really flavorful artisan loaf – $5/piece

and pastry this week…

 Bear Claws! – Made with a danish pastry dough rich in cream, eggs, sugar and butter. The dough is rolled out and spread with a filing made with almond paste, powdered sugar, egg whites and just a bit of cinnamon to round out the flavor. Then, because bears love honey, topped with a honey glaze after baking.  –2/$5 

Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday the Bakery emails the week’s bread offering to the mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday (and not already claimed) will be available for pickup at the wine shop Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm.  Contact us at least two weeks before your visit to get on the bread list .

 

This week’s Wine Tasting

Schmitt Pinot Blanc ’17 Alsace $19
Creamy-smooth nose of subdued pear notes adds an earthy element on the palate and adds an earthy element toward a dry, smooth finish.

Humble Roots Shiraz – Viognier ’20         Australia          $18
Delightful blend of 98% Shiraz and 2% Viognier;  shows layers of fleshy plum, oak, and blackberry with earthy hints of incense, ash, cocoa, black currant, and pepper.

Jacob Williams Barbera  ’22        Washington    $34
Medium body; juicy red fruit up front opens to a savory and herbal mid-palate and earthy finish. Enjoyable now, but sure to get even better as it matures.

 

Economics of the Heart: Fear is the Mind-killer

For our entire lives we old-timers have enjoyed broad confidence that our nation’s Constitution effectively constrained our government institutions from partisan over-reach, regardless of party control. Over the past 30 years that confidence has been substantially eroded by the impacts of right-wing fake-news media on our government institutions, including the Executive, Congress, and the Supreme Court.

Today we face not only external enemies, but also a broad array of internal enemies which have been spreading nonstop mis- and dis-information across the media spectrum since 1987, when Reagan’s FCC abolished the guiding Broadcast Fairness Doctrine. Introduced in 1949, it required the holders of broadcast licenses to 1) devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, AND 2) to air contrasting views regarding those matters. The repeal of the Fairness doctrine opened the floodgates for 24/7 bombardment of anger-mongering political fictions across the broadcast and social media universe. Many if not all of  these platforms are sponsored and maintained by very well-funded domestic and foreign enemies committed  to our nation’s destruction.

The most familiar, of course, is Fox News, which has been playing the same shtick for decades now. On any given morning every pundit/host begins with the same (word for word) “lie line of the day” about whomever is the day’s target. Some people get all their “news” from these guys. As discussed in a recent post, these decades of misinformation have led much of today’s electorate to believe unquestioningly in a completely fictitious world where they are being victimized by immigrants, college graduates, vaccinations, “wokeness,” children’s books, other religions, and other idiocy. They have heard it all so often they take it for granted as true.

The last 8 years of 24/7 Tweetster Chaos is the direct result of that ’87 FCC decision to legalize the broadcast of outright lies for political purposes. That one political decision in 1987 has brought us here, today, to the brink of both national and global destruction from a number of directions. The T’s recent nominations of so many glaringly unqualified candidates to head our most important government positions has led Authoritarianism scholar Timothy Snyder to believe those selections are to not to run those important agencies, but to cripple them and give the Administration dictatorial control of the entire government with no oversight from Congress or the Courts…a truly terrifying prospect. Some others suggest they are deliberately outrageous to test the loyalty of Republican lawmakers to their lawless leader.

In Congress we are seeing some resistance to some nominations and what we hope is a growing sense of self-preservation of members to protect their Constitutional turf; but Congressional courage against the T has been hard to find. That is scary because it may be our only possible firewall against the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 plan for dismantling the Constitution altogether. We even saw a brief clip of everyone’s least favorite Senator (Josh Hawley) criticizing the nomination list. One would think that all House and Senate members would want to guard their domains of responsibility from the Project 2025 planned overthrow of democracy. On the other hand, we have  seen extraordinary inability of most of them to stand up to him.

Scary times. For now have each other, our own values and commitments, our State Representatives and Senators, and State Governments and Constitutions against a highly stacked deck.

If the Tweetster gets his dictatorship, of course, there will be no further need for a Congress, a Senate, or a Supreme Court.

Many years ago a former student, friend, and world-class mountain climber based one of his “motivational talks” on a tense experience climbing frozen waterfalls somewhere in Alberta. Finding the ice was not in great shape, he kept repeating two words to himself to get across safely: Concentration. Commitment.

There are 400 million of us. We’re in this together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wine Tasting

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