Winemaker Antonio Lamona began making wine in the late sixties, cultivating organic vines from the beginning. Located just 3 km uphill from the Adriatic in the small, coastal province of Teramo, his farm is entirely self-sustaining, producing their own salami, bread, vegetables, olive oil, and cheese. The vineyards lie in a unique microclimate between the Adriatic Sea and the Apennine Mountain with 300 days of sun per year and comparatively few climate variations.
lummi island wine tasting oct 19 ’23
Hours this weekend
Open Fridays 4-6
This week’s wine tasting
Girot Ribot Masia Parera Brut Rose Cava Italy $16
Delicate perlage, deep minerality, and intoxicating white flower and baby mushroom aromas make this wine memorable and delightful.
La Quercia Aglianico ‘22 Italy $14
Full bodied with notes of ripe plum and white pepper on smooth, fine-grained tannins. A lovely match with a wide range of savory dishes.
Masseria del Feudo Nero d’Avola Sicilia ’21 Italy $19
“Cherry, plum, vanilla and toast make for a well-balanced wine of medium intensity that goes down smooth thanks to its soft tannins and silky consistency. It would pair beautifully with stewed meats or pork dishes.
Friday Bread Pickup This Week!
Le Pave d’autrefois – Translates roughly as old paving stones, a ciabatta like bread with a lot of hydration so is simply divided into approximate squares – hence the paving stones name. Made with a mix of bread flour with fresh milled whole wheat, rye and buckwheat flours for hearty whole grain goodness. A great artisan bread -$5/loaf
French Country Bread – A levain bread made with mostly bread flour, fresh milled whole wheat and and a bit of toasted wheat germ. After building the levain with a sourdough culture and mixing the final dough it gets a long cool overnight ferment in the refrigerator. This really allows the flavor to develop in this bread. Not a refined city baguette, but a rustic loaf that you would find in the countryside.– 5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Individual Cinnamon Rolls – These are made with a rich sweet roll dough that is full of eggs, butter and sugar. The dough is rolled out, spread with pastry cream and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. Then rolled up and sliced into individual rolls for baking. And boy are they delicious!! I can only make a limited number so get your order in early so you don’t lose out –
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: La Quercia Aglianico ‘22 Italy $14
La Quercia vineyard in Abruzzo
La Quercia consistently produces great wines from low-yield vineyard management by constantly cutting back the vines for the best quality fruit, taking no shortcuts, consistently producing expressive, balanced, 100% organic wines.
Economics of the Heart: Rollerball, Leonard Leo, and a World in the Crosshairs
We have written before about the prescience of the 1975 sci-fi film Rollerball in imagining what a corporate autocracy of the future might look like. The basic story is that Jonathan, played by James Caan, has become so influential a global star in the violent game of Rollerball that he he has become a threat to corporate stability and is being involuntarily retired. In this scene (sorry, audio only) Jonathan (not the brightest bulb in the ceiling) is in the high-rise office of one of the handful of corporate leaders that run the world (played unforgettably by John Houseman with his deliberate, authoritative British diction). He briefly describes how the Majors (corporations) have replaced governments, eliminated poverty, war, and other inconveniences…”and all we ask in return– all we’ve Ever asked– is Not to Interfere with Management Decisions. (this scene has video)
If we fast forward forty years to today’s world and the emerging blends of corporate power and government structure, mission, and control we see around the globe, we might wonder if national loyalty is being replaced with an array of corporate bottom lines. A recommended read on this topic is currently out in the latest edition of The Nation. The article explores in some detail how Leonard Leo, with the help of the billion-dollar deep pockets of the Marble Freedom Trust, has over the last few years weaponized the Federalist Society into “a coherent right-wing ideological network in the courts, not just at the highest level but also including the lower courts and district attorneys as well as Republican lawmakers.”
Mr. Leo has played a significant role in bringing a number of consequential cases before the Supreme Court that have chipped away at rules protecting the fairness of elections, the right to vote, and the voter redistricting process for legislative seats at all levels. He is personally responsible for the conservative lock of federal courts around the country, connecting high level appellate judges with billionaires for social engagements, travel, loans, and the rest, as we have seen particularly in the case of Justice Thomas, but with others as well. This is Corruption with a Capital C, folks, and has led to the erosion of voting rights, women’s health care rights, gun control, environmental protection…the list is long and growing. (Read more from Propublica .) No possible good will ever come from policies like that.
All of this comes up because so much of the world seems to have been going nuts for about thirty years now. Personally I blame business schools for taking the humanity out of everyday commerce and replacing it with various kinds of fake service. Everyone now knows that calling that 800 number for help with your corporate service accounts (phone, internet, doctors, hospitals, civil servants — you name it–) will begin with at least a five-minute menu to “help you route your call” correctly and probably end with frustration. We all know that when we have a problem with a product or service, what we really want is to talk with a real person.
At this point, Everyone knows this is all about businesses saving money on labor by substituting various bots to deflect your help call until you give up, and stealing many hours of your life to save the few cents it would cost to have a actual person answer the phone and direct your call in mere seconds…like my mom did as a switchboard operator in the fifties.
Or maybe it’s that the tiny fraction of the world’s population that owns nearly everything is already more powerful than most countries. So the King of Saudi Arabia can buy a Jared Kushner or Putin can buy a Donald Trump or a Xi Jinping can buy a Putin and get what they need to keep gaining more power and more wealth. As in Rollerball, the Corporations have no human values, only bottom lines. As long as everyone plays along, they are left alone. If they step out of line they are thrown out of the lifeboat– if they were lucky enough to be in one in the first place.
It is also clear that global population is growing faster than the ability of the world’s over-stressed resources to provide for them without killing the entire planet. So we don’t know what’s going to happen. But we can be pretty sure the .1% are not worried, and they can get along very well without most of us. Btw, that suggests a coming battle at some point between the forced birthers and the megarich who own everything as it becomes increasingly and painfully clear with each passing day that there are already way, way, way more human beings on our tiny, beautiful planet than it can support. After all, from the corporate standpoint, the easiest way to save the planet is to make about half the humans go away.
It’s not personal…it’s just, you know…business.
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