lummi island wine tasting oct 22 ’21
Current Covid Protocols
Looks like a rainy/windy weekend ahead. This past Friday we had a small group of regulars hang out a bit after bread pickup…enough for a sense of community without triggering Covid anxiety. Nice!
Last Saturday was a taste of the quiet off-season pubby days of close neighbors and familiar faces. Very low-key.
This week we will again offer indoor tastings on both Friday and Saturday from 4-6 pm, with our familiar Covid requests:
— You must have completed a full Covid vaccination sequence to participate;
— We ask all to maintain mindful social distance from people outside your regular “neighborhood pods.”
Friday Bread
Each Sunday bread offerings for the coming Friday are emailed to the mailing list by Island Bakery. Orders returned by the 5 pm Tuesday deadline are baked and available for pickup each Friday at the wine shop from 4:00 – 5:30 pm.
Over the years the bakery has established a rotating list of several dozen breads and pastries from which two different artisan breads and a pastry are selected each week.
If you would like to be on the bread order mailing list, click on the Contact Us link at the top of the page and fill out the form.
This week’s deliveries:
Pan de Cioccolate – This delicious chocolate artisan bread is NOT a dessert pastry. Rather it is a rich chocolate bread made with a levain, bread flour, and fresh milled rye flour, honey for sweetness, vanilla and plenty of dark chocolate. Makes GREAT toast and even better French toast! – $5/loaf.
Levain w/ Dried Cherries and Pecans – Made from an overnight levain sourdough starter. This allows the fermentation process to start and the gluten to start developing. The final dough is made with the levain, bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat and then loaded up with dried cherries and toasted pecans. A nice rustic loaf that goes well with meats and cheese – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Black Sesame & Candied Lemon Brioche: A delicious brioche dough full of eggs, butter and sugar. Filled with fresh lemon zest and candied lemon and as if that wasn’t enough, topped with a black sesame streusel before baking…Good, they be!! – 2/$5
Wine of the Week:
This week we return to an old favorite wine from a favorite Washington winemaker, Javier Alfonso of Pomum Cellars in Woodinville. The Pomum label now has its own estate vineyard, Konnowac Vineyard located at 1100 ft elevation in the northwest corner of the Rattlesnake Hills AVA in the Yakima Valley, which provides fruit for most of the French varietals.
In addition, because Javier grew up in the Ribero del Duero region of Spain, he also makes a number of Spanish wines under the Idilico label, and he often refers to tempranillo as simply tinto, as if it was understood that “red wine” is just another way of saying tempranillo. All his wines therefore display his preference for highly drinkable wines with rich, evolving, and lingering flavors, silky tannic depth and length, and a Muse that beckons “hey, Amigo, un vaso mas!”
This weekend we are pouring his Idilico garnacha, a lovely and engaging wine that definitely displays its winemaker’s fingerprints.
The Economics of the Heart: The Rising Costs of Ego
In the last few days the news cycle has presented us with a with several subtle harbingers of Our Future with regard to climate change and the very real threat of economic extinction of human civilization and millions of living species.
“We assess that climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to US national security interests as the physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions mount.”
- Our National Intelligence agencies have just released a report outlining how the accelerating impacts of climate change will be increasing a broad array of security threats to the United States, and by implication, to civilization itself as many countries face desertification, devastating wildfires, and economic collapse. We are already seeing the beginnings of mass migrations from failing economies from North Africa to Europe, from Afghanistan to neighboring countries, and to the US from Central America. These will get worse at an increasing rate determined by how quickly and how much, if at all, we humans are able to cut our carbon footprints on our World.
“The Freedom to Vote Act is therefore able to counteract some of these state Republican measures in a way that the For the People Act, introduced back in January, does not.” -The Nation
2. Waking up yesterday morning I had this image: 74 million Democrats and their US Senators are all on board a gigantic plane that has been flying around DC for months preparing to land. That’s because shortly after takeoff, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema took over the cockpit and locked the door. Early on we thought they wanted some concessions, and that if we gave them they would land the plane safely, and we would all go about our lives in a better world for what they had done.
After the first month we were still anxious to please them and also anxious about not pleasing them. After the second month, when the menu was down to soggy crackers and recycled urine-water, we started getting grumpy. Now, after four months, and we are all pooping in the aisles and kids are whimpering, we gag on their political sadism and take their threats seriously. Now we see that that they will crash our plane into the Beating Heart of Mother Earth if we don’t let them strangle Mother Earth more slowly over the next couple of decades.
All of which is to say, probably easier just to write them bigger checks for their votes than Big Coal can offer Manchin or Big Pharma can offer Sinema. Seems like the best choice all around, let’s do it!
“There is no middle ground between the arsonist and the firefighter. ” – Democracy Docket
3. Yesterday’s “demonstration vote” on the simple matter of bringing the new Freedom To Vote Act to the Senate floor for mere discussion, while not surprising, is still deeply disturbing. Majority Leader Schumer brought the bill to the Senate floor partially as a demonstration to Sen. Manchin, who months ago had promised to bring at least 11 Republican votes in favor of such a bill. Instead, not even one Republican Senator would even vote to allow discussion of the bill. Schumer voted against his own bill so that it could be brought back to the floor at a later date.
A brief review of #2 above highlights Mr. Manchin’s central role in this week’s musing. In truth it is turning out that a technical majority of one or two votes in the House or the Senate is a Stalemate, and it is an astonishing political achievement that the new administration has brought it as far as they have.
Don’t know about you, but another article we read this week by Charles Blow in the NYT convinced us that as desirable as many of the goals of proposed legislation are for promoting the general welfare of our entire national family and its long term future, we have come to believe that at this moment in our history, our first priority must be to do whatever is necessary to establish and preserve the right of all citizens to vote and have their votes count equally. Even if we don’t get all we want, it will take longer for Republicans to take it all away. Again.
We are engaged in two wars, on different fronts but against the same enemy, our own human nature. All of our history is based on internecine warfare over everything more than one of us desires. Right now our entire planet lies on the chopping block. Like Joe Manchin it is ambivalent about human survival; to Gaia it’s just another play, another curtain, a brief intermission.
This week’s $5 tasting:
Folie a Deux Pinot Gris ’18 Sonoma $14
Guava, pineapple and lemon-lime flavors make for a fleshy, brightly layered expression of the varietal, both soft on the palate and crisp on the palate.
Los Arraez Lagares Spain $
60/40 Monastrell- Cab blend from Valencia; deep and dark aromas of juicy, ripe dark plums leading to palate that dances around flavors of plum and prune with notes of coffee and chocolate.
Idilico Garnacha ’14 Washington $18
Moderately saturated, showing flavors of cherry, strawberry, game and licorice, with flint and rock notes on the inviting nose. Graceful, pliant and sweet with a lingering, firm, ripely tannic finish.
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2072 Granger Way