Posted at October 12, 2023
Hours this weekend
Open Friday 4-6 or…“anytime for wine emergencies!”
This week’s wine tasting
Limoux jmt-29, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
J. Laurens Cremant de Limoux France $16
Long before there was “champagne,” there was cremant de Limoux, a little area SW of Carcasonne a sparkling wine with a creamy mousse texture, notes of baked apple, prune, and yeasty minerality.
The Wolftrap Syrah Mourvèdre Viognier ’18 South Africa $12
Aromas of ripe plums, red currants, violets, Italian herbs and exotic spices lead to vibrant flavors of darker berries and spicy plum with hints of orange peel that linger on a juicy finish. Also way over-delivers for its modest price!
Marchetti Villa Bonomi Conero Riserva ’19 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.
Friday Bread Pickup This Week!
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…
Gibassiers – A traditional french pastry that incorporates the flavors from the southern France region. Made with a delicious sweet dough full of milk, butter, eggs and olive oil. The addition of orange flower water, candied orange peel and anise seed bring great flavor to these pastries. After baking they are brushed with melted butter and sprinkled with more sugar. Ooh La La a delightful pastry to go along with your morning coffee or tea.
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.
Wine of the Week: Marchetti Villa Bonomi Conero Riserva ’19 Italy $27
This “
Villa Bonomi Rosso Conero Riserva” is a dry and powerful red wine from Montepulciano D’Abruzzo grapes grown above the Adriatic in the Marche region of Italy, and not to be confused with the many sangiovese wines made in the old city of Montepulciano. It is a limited production wine (3000 bottles) from an 18 hectare hillside (120m) vineyard in calcareous and clay/marl soil, and which is consistently recognized for excellence by the sommeliers of the region.
The vines are maintained using the “cordon spur” method, in which the vines are trained to run horizontally and trimmed between seasons for optimal fruit quality. The wine begins with a long maceration at controlled temperature, then refermented with fresh must, and malolactic fermentation to get the most from the fruit.
The wine has a strong tannic structure which smooths out over time and with aeration, and which gives it years of shelf life to get even better. There’s a lot to like!
https://www.archives.gov/files/founding-docs
Economics of the Heart: Telling Truth from Lies
A lot of us old-timers well remember this lyric from the sixties, when social reaction to the Vietnam war, combined with the sudden widespread popularity of marijuana, created a youth counterculture, some great music, and widespread protest against the war. Timothy Leary neatly bookmarked the era with his beginning slogan (Tune in, Turn on, Drop out) and its sequel a few years later, “Question Authority, Think for Yourself.”
Events of 1968 were an abrupt wake-up call to some dark corners of the American body politic with the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in the prime of their intellectual and political lives, followed by the election of Richard Nixon to the Presidency. Still, in those days there were lots of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, but with a lot of overlap. The Supreme Court was also balanced and prudent, news organizations generally reported actual facts, and disagreements were mostly matters of degree and balance. Those balances made for a relatively functional government.
That all changed with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan as President, whose primary mission was rolling back the New Deal. He courted Southern Democrats with major drops in financial assistance to the poor, the sick, the elderly, the insissues likeane, and minorities, and “throwing the welfare queens out of the lifeboat.” His budget director came up with “supply side” economics, an intellectually bereft theory that proclaimed that the rich were the real drivers of the economy because they reinvest their profits in new businesses that hire more workers, making the pie bigger for everyone.
Since the New Deal, the dominant macroeconomic model had been the widely accepted Keynesian theory that total demand of consumers is what drives an economy, as part of a circular flow in which households exchange labor for wages and spend their wages on the goods and services they produced, while business invested their sales in capital assets and hired workers to operate them. Everyone had a place. Reaganomics did indeed make billions of dollars for corporations and wealthy stockholders, but from 1980 to the present wealth and income became more and more skewed toward the richest Americans. In today’s world, many CEO’s earn hundreds for every dollar a worker earns.
All of this came to mind while watching this interview last night on PBS with a representative from the Atlantic Council, a think tank in international affairs focused on maintaining international security and global economic prosperity across North America and Europe. These last eight years of the Tweetster (he of the 25,000 documented lies noted by the Washington Post) have, for millions of Americans, replaced truth with sloganized “alternative facts” that have muddied all waters, evaded two impeachments, and have kept our nation on edge for three years by pretending that he actually won the 2020 election. Even worse, millions of people still believe it! And that has been made possible by 24/7 carefully scripted 24/7 Fake News on Fox, social media, and talk radio.
The interview conversation focused on organizations around the world which make a business of propagating false narratives for political reasons and asserting that there are all kinds of reasons why it is not generally illegal to lie in politics or in the press, while there can be liability. And that has brought our nation to this head-scratching place where a substantial portion of our population actually believes that the 2020 election was stolen, that Hunter Biden is more of a crook than the Tweetster, and even, as Nixon once asserted “if the President does it, it’s not illegal.”
It is hard to imagine how civilization can long endure in a world which makes no distinctions between truth and lies, fact and fiction, rules-conforming and rules-breaking. Until recently our laws have generally worked fairly well at making such distinctions. But it has all gone downhill since the Gingrich Republicans abandoned polity for shouting insults like five-year-olds. The problem seems to be that the Right gotten tired of playing by the rules, and as periodically happens in human history, some people are only okay when they have complete authority over everyone and will do anything to get it.
Along the same lines, CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists) offers an interesting exploration of the related issue of Deciding who decides which news is fake, including issues like:
- how abuse of media laws by authoritarians around the world is a clear warning against government regulation of information,
- to avoid the privatization of censorship, any self-regulation by tech companies must be transparent, subject to independent oversight, and include a path to remedy for those affected;
- how the increasing intrusion of misinformation and propaganda in domestic media are damaging existing democracies in places including the U.S. and U.K. by interfering in domestic politics like US elections and the British referendum on Brexit.
Bottom line: Democracy can only persist when the people share a set of common values and agree to the set of rules everyone will follow to make it work.
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