lummi island wine tasting sep 15-16 ’23
Hours this weekend:
Open Friday & Saturday, September 15-16, 4-6 pm
This week’s wine tasting
Chapoutier Belleruche Blanc ’21 France $14
Delicious blend of grenache blanc and roussanne; fragrant and perfumed with a light, grilled-lemon note over ripe melon,with a lingering palate of rich white peach.
La Vielle Ferme Rosé ’22 France $11
Classic and tasty blend of grenache, syrah, and cinsault from northern Provence; fruity, dry, crisp, delicious, and smooth, all at a bargain price!
Townshend Cellars T3 Red Washington $16
Bordeaux style blend of cab, merlot and cab franc; fruit forward with hints of black currant and vanilla, with layers of complexity and depth through extensive oak aging in French and American barrels.
L’Envoye Fleurie Beaujolais Gamay Noir ’19 France $18
Lilting aromas of violets and roses, red fruits and berries; flavors of pomegranate and fresh summer fruits are enlivened by a vibrant acidity and a supple finish with fine, well structured tannins.
NO Friday Bread Pickup This Week!
Sorry, as all of you on the bread mailing list already know from Janice…
“There is NO bread Friday this week. I’m off on my annual baseball trip with my nieces… We’ve been traveling around the country visiting a different baseball park for 20 years. Now my nieces have daughters and they come as well. It’s a fun tradition..!”
Wine of the Week: L’Envoye Fleurie Beaujolais Gamay Noir ’19 France
Fleurie is known for an elegant, floral style of Beaujolais from free-run juice– i.e., not mechanically pressed. Chateau Vivier is one of the oldest monopole plots in the region, where east-facing, 50-year-old untrained vines are grown in deep granite hillside soils and produce lively, expressive wines.
Half the fruit was de-stemmed and vinified in concrete tanks, while the rest went through carbonic maceration,which provides a floral lift and intense primary fruit. After 2 weeks the free-run juice was racked to stainless steel where the wine continued its élevage. The takeaway here is that it is a carefully made wine!
We confess limited experience with beaujolais and have only a handful of these left…so we will pour while they last this weekend, and if popular will get more!
Mar a Lago Update: Republicans go Full Troglodyte
Inauguration Day in 2020 was, we thought, the final defeat of the Morlocks and their Head Troglodyte, a welcome relief after four years of insanity that would make even the Mat Hatter wince. We were SO naive, completely unable to anticipate, regognize, or counter the ongoing assault on our country from within.
The many months of House hearings on the attempt to overturn the 2020 Presidential election by force, deceit, mob violence, and a 24/7 flood of media misinformation brought some dawning awareness that yes, indeed, a large number of well-placed political players were refusing to accept that their candidate had lost the election, and were committed to overturning the election. Yet somehow, a great proportion of the country continues to believe the Republican lie over the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. An entire sector of the population, including in particular fundamentalist, rural, less-educated white Christian men are a willing audience to the wealthy white businessmen who exploit them and make the Tweetster their cause célèbre martyr.
It’s as if the Covid Pandemic not only ushered in three years of quarantine, hardship, sickness, and death to a global population, but also somehow facilitated a kind of social madness across our own nation, driven by the Tweetster’s constant lies and his national coterie of spineless lackies. Nothing sums up these people as well as the empty-headed parent characters in this little scene from the old movie Time Bandits.
As of this moment the Tweetster has been indicted on ninety-some felony counts across four jurisdictions– the kind of numbers that not even the most notorious gangsters of history ever came close to matching. And yet, despite the extraordinary seriousness of the charges against him, a substantial amount of national news coverage (Fox) poo-poos the charges, as if he is just an ordinary guy, a bit flamboyant perhaps, but all in good fun, eh?
The backdrop of this very moment is that our physical infrastructure is being destroyed one place at a time by fires, floods, droughts, super-storms, and super heat waves brought on by climate change, long-accumulating paybacks for our human excesses and irresponsibility. Under the auspices of “creating wealth,” corporate decision makers have for decades been ignoring or dissing the warnings of a World-full of scientific studies on global warming (many sponsored by oil companies) about the future costs of the global climate crisis we humans have unleashed.
One wonders if there is a connection between the expanding deprivations and infrastructure destruction from global warming and the increasing tyranny of governments, especially in the Third World. Bob Dylan was of course at least partially wrong when he wrote “When you got nothin’ you got nothin’ to lose,” because things can always get worse. A warming planet speeds up and amplifies the cycle of more evaporation here becoming unprecedented downpours there, more heat in the atmosphere creating more kinetic energy and higher, more destructive winds.
It is bad enough, scary enough, and challenging enough to be trying to keep our planet livable in a world where most world governments understand the stakes and commit to slowing, stopping, and reversing climate change as soon as possible. It is terrifying to contemplate how impossible that will be in a world led by grifter-dictators like the Tweetster and many corporate CEOs, who see the crisis as an opportunity to amass more personal wealth and power. You know, like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
Leadership, intelligence, commitment, and dedicated service are the main ingredients for bringing our country and our world back toward a survivable balance. The sad truth is that this is not exaggeration — it’s really happening!
Right now, this minute, our nation is deeply divided not just on our values, but on the very facts of what we see, hear, and experience through our own senses. That sinking feeling you are experiencing is exactly what lemmings feel when most of their comrades start pushing them toward that dark cliff…
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