lummi island wine tasting sept 17 ’25
Hours this weekend: 4-6 pm Friday & Saturday
…September colors across the street and reefnetting gear in Legoe Bay
This week’s wine tasting
Valminor Albarino Rias Baixas ’22 Spain $23
Straw yellow-green color; rich nose of mandarin orange, lime apricot, and peach; floral notes of orange blossom and white flowers with fresh, lively, and full-bodied palate, good structure, well-integrated acidity, decadent, smooth unctuousness.
Angeline Cab Sauv ’23 California $16
Fruit-forward with aromas of lush cherry, cassis, rich cherry, and plum flavors with hints of vanilla and soft oak that over-deliver for the modest price.
Shatter Grenache Vin de Pays des Côtes Catalanes ’19 France $19
From Old Vines in Roussillon’s black schist soil; nose of dark fruit with a hint of espresso; velvety texture with black currant, spice and cured meat flavors with a touch of coffee; firm structure, supple tannins, excellent acidity and overall balance.
Wine of the Week: Shatter Grenache Côtes Catalanes ’19 France $19
The wine is made from grenache grown in vineyards located near Maury in the Roussillon region of Southwest France by California winemaker Joel Gott. As it turns out, we were lost for a bit in this very area about ten years ago. We were staying in Lagrasse, at the northern edge of the Corbieres wine region, and drove south through the rugged landscape where centuries ago the heretic Cathars had fortified themselves in remote mountain fortresses to practice their particular form of Catholicism. It’s a long, sad, and brutal story.
As we moved into Roussillon, we found ourselves on a narrow dirt road winding through farmland when the road took a sudden dip onto a Very Narrow one-lane “bridge” close to the water over a narrow canal and with no guard rails, and from our vantage point no clear sense of where it went after that. Eventually we got up the nerve to cross it, and within a half mile came to a major highway along the boundary between Corbieres and Roussillon very close to Maury.
The area is known for its nutrient-poor schist soil which forces vines to grow deep to find nutrients, evoking concentrated flavors. The name Shatter and the bottle photo are an homage to the shattered schist soil. All in all, pretty tasty! We found a handful of bottles in the cellar which will probably disappear quickly!
Economics of the Heart: Project 2025 and the Seven Mountains Mandate
Charlie Kirk, as it turns out, had been playing a pivotal role in Project 2025 to replace American democracy with a particularly racist, sexist form of White Christian feudalism for a couple of years. As laid out in detail in the forthcoming (Oct 1) Seven Mountains Mandate (SMM) by Matthew Boedy, an English professor at the University of North Georgia, Kirk had been the key operative in recruiting students around the country.
Boedy makes the case that Kirk modeled his Turning Point USA as a strategy to take over all of the seven key spheres of influence: Education, Government, Religion, Family, Business, Media, and Entertainment–pretty much everything human beings do. The SMM has become especially influential in the New Apostolic Reformation, a loose network of charismatic, Christian nationalist churches with their own self-proclaimed prophets.
All of this ties in perfectly with the 50-yr machinations of the Heritage Foundation, which authored thousands of pages of legislation passed by Republican Presidents since Reagan. Project 2025 is a comprehensive blueprint for ending American democracy and replacing it with a “Christian” state unaffiliated with any known Protestant religion. On the contrary, it has all the earmarks of every authoritarian government: to stay in power indefinitely, have low tolerance for dissent or disagreement, and to accumulate vast personal wealth. Think Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Hirohito’s Japan, Franco’s Spain. In a certain sense, autocracy is the new feudalism, the default setting for any nation where power and wealth are concentrated in very few hands.
Here in America the current coup has been decades in the making by a handful of multi-billionaires who have been playing a very long game to get to this moment. They got their foot in the door with Reagan, who passed most of their proposed legislation, including in particular doing away with the FCC rule requiring all sides of any broadcast, and cemented their position by loading the Supreme Court with business-friendly Catholic Justices who do what they are told.
The 2025 political climate is changing how people relate in lots of ways. This article in the Guardian creeps around the mind games now happening at the high school level as many boys are leaning more to the right, and girls to the left. That makes many girls, who are more liberal than today’s boys, feel uncertain about the current politics of conversation, sensing social pressure to remain passive in the face of offensive remarks. The private tensions caused by the growing authoritarianism are seeping into social fears and behavior at every age.
Another harbinger of the moment is the recent blowback against comedy host Jimmy Kimmel for a brief comment about Charlie Kirk’s onstage murder in Utah. The Producers Guild of America said in a statement on Instagram: “Free speech is fundamental to our democracy…late-night television has long been a space where satire and commentary contribute to our national dialogue. We believe that artistic expression is essential, and that critical voices must not be silenced.” It is, of course, classic Republican Hypocrisy to accuse Dems for occasionally doing what R’s do habitually.
And then, of course there is still the ongoing matter of warrantless arrests and disappearing of foreign citizens who have appropriate documentation to be in the US. This brief video shows a young Turkish woman, attending Tufts University as a doctoral student, being detained by ICE in Boston and immediately flown to detention in Louisiana with no due process. video link (scroll to bottom)
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