lummi island wine tasting july 5-6 ’24
Hours, June 28-29 ’24
Friday 4-6 pm Saturday 3-5 pm
Last night in late twilight we noticed this eagle high in a fir tree about 100 ft away, further shadowed by a thicket of branches. It was without a doubt the biggest eagle any of us had ever seen! Ulee saw it, too, and just stared without barking.
They DO have a Presence…!
Friday Bread This Week
Barley, Whole Wheat, & Rye Levain – a levain bread where the sourdough culture is built over several days and allowed to ferment before the final dough is mixed. Made with bread flour and freshly milled whole wheat, barley and rye flours. – $5/loaf
Rye w/ Currants, Pumpkin Seeds & Cracked Coriander – a bread that I haven’t made on a regular basis. Made with a starter fed with rye instead of wheat flour, the final dough includes bread flour and freshly milled rye flour, some molasses for sweetness and pumpkin seeds, currants and cracked coriander seed make for an interesting flavor profile – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Pain aux Raisin – made with the same laminated dough as croissants. The dough is rolled out, spread with pastry cream and sprinkled with a mix of golden raisins and dried cranberries that have been soaked in sugar syrup. Rolled up and sliced before baking. – 2/$5
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday Janice emails the week’s bread offering to her mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday 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 at least a week before visiting!
This week’s wine tasting
Jacob Williams Viognier ’22 WA $32
Melon, pineapple, & confectionary notes on the nose. Green tropical fruits on the palate – a little bit of pineapple and mango. Smooth and rich texture throughout.
Monte Tondo Veneto Corvina ’20 Italy $12
Organically farmed; bright nose of fresh cherries and black pepper; fresh, light, and lively palate of cherry, dark chocolate and spice, with supple, well-integrated tannins and a smooth, seductive, slightly spicy finish. Our go-to red wine for summer lunch on the deck!
Cote 125 Corbieres Rouge ’19 France $15
Classic Corbieres blend of carignan, grenache, syrah, cinsault; rich and concentrated with blueberry and strawberry aromas and flavors, with notes of spices and black pepper, good balance, and a long, smooth finish.
Wine of the Week: Jacob Williams Viognier ’23 WA $32
For some reason a lot of people never get around to tasting viognier, a white French varietal most prevalent in the Northern Rhone region of France. It is now grown across the world, including here in Washington. Styles range from bright, light, and crisp with mouth-watering acidity to voluptuous, nuanced, and lingering. In many places, including Washington, a few percent of viognier is added to red wines, particularly syrah.
Viognier carries an aura of refined elegance compared to, say, chardonnay. You can dress up chardonnay with extended periods in new oak, time on the lees, and other methods, and it can be wonderful. But there is a reason why wine critic Karen Macneil, in her “Wine Bible,” describes viognier as “the most drippingly sensuous white wine.”
Our experience with the viognier at Jacob Williams when we first visited a couple of years ago was definitely in that category. The latest vintage might need a little more time in the bottle, but it is already showing better than many!
Economics of the Heart: The War for Everything Has Begun
Heritage Foundation President celebrates the death of Liberty with Supreme Court AI image from Davinci
The Real Insurrection against our democracy has been afoot for several decades now, with lots of preparation from the the John Birch Society, the legalization of lying talk-radio slanderers (Limbaugh and ilk made it ubiquitous 24/7), and of course Fox news, which only tells lies, usually beginning early morning with the Lie of the Day, repeated over and over and over for 24 hrs. The other Big Player is the Heritage Foundation, as discussed in detail in this in-depth interview by Lulu Garcia-Navarro with new Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts. Check it out…this man’s words radiate Evil like a Tolkien wraith, steaming with existential Menace. Make no mistake: these guys intend to control everyone and everything, with cold, business-school trained concern only for the bottom line and vast indifference for collateral casualties.
A recent BBC post offers a readable summary of the implications of Project 2025. Its goals are to take away or restrict every Constitutional freedom that we Americans have enjoyed, treasured, and defended for over 200 years. No, we are not making this up; ending democracy is the new Republican platform.
The recent Supreme Court removal of all legal constraints on Presidential “official acts” opens the door for a dictatorial Presidency with no rules at all, a Fascist state where citizens have no legal rights, no protection from politically applied arrests and punishments, while the President remains completely above scrutiny. Project 2025 is designed to guarantee the Far Right to gain and hold complete power, end elections for good as it implements its profoundly dystopian vision.
Therefore, given the ongoing leakage of hope on the left, it is a relief to read Joyce Vance’s most recent post in her daily “Civil Discourse” post, describing in detail her conversation with California Congressman Jared Huffman, founder of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force. The project has an accelerated timetable for researching, analyzing, and sharing data with Congress and the public on the hidden dangers of Project goals and methods, and work to counter them. It’s a late start, but shows promise.
That, together with the peculiar realization that our current President now has all the powers of the “Unitary Executive” the Supreme Court just awarded to “the former guy,” is a flickering glimmer of hope in our unfolding existential battle to preserve democracy. Surely Uncle Joe now has the authority to steal the election himself and lock up the other guy, yes..? I mean, isn’t that what the Justices want him to do…???
lummi island wine tasting june 28-29, ’24
Hours, June 28-29 ’24
Fridays 4-6 pm Saturdays 3-5 pm
Friday Bread This Week
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 add great flavor and crunch. And just a little honey for some sweetness. – $5/loaf
Polenta Levain – Also made with a levain, known as sourdough, 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 bread is a nice rustic loaf with great corn flavor. – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Gibassiers – A traditional french pastry recipe from southern France. Made with a delicious sweet dough full of milk, butter, eggs and olive oil, with orange flower water, candied orange peel and anise seed. After baking they are brushed with melted butter and sprinkled with more sugar. – 2/$5
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday Janice emails the week’s bread offering to her mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday 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 at least a week before visiting!
This week’s wine tasting
Jacob Williams Chardonnay ’22 WA $32
Whole cluster pressed, barrel fermented on lees and stirred regularly during aging; fruity aromas of cantaloupe and Bartlett pears; lively on the palate with notes of lemon citrus, vanilla,and chalk.
Phantom Red Blend ’20 WA $17
Petite Sirah- Zinfandel blend delivers palate of dark blackberry and boysenberry with pepper notes and on a balanced structure with tantalizing layers of baking spices sandt velvety tannins…a consistent local favorite!
Rocks of Bawn Shafts and Furrows Red ’20 WA $18
88% Merlot from Frenchman Hills Vineyard (south-facing & high elevation); 12 % Merlot from Southwind Vineyard in Walla Walla (full-bodied and rich); 6% Cab Sauv from Red Mountain & Horse Heaven Hills; 4% Cab Franc and a spicy 2% Malbec from the iconic Red Willow Vineyard in Yakima Valley.
Economics of the Heart: Only You Can Save Us, Obi Juan Merchan!
Sometime in the last couple of days it occurred to me that our country and our world entered a strange and deeply disturbing sur-reality when the Tweetster came down that escalator, one no one could have made up. We have spent most of the last decade imprisoned in a disturbing, Monty Pythonesque, never-ending Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Like Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone of our youth, our world was hijacked by one insane man with an addiction for constant attention. In all that time there has been no place you can go to escape the incessant tweets and lies, the self-aggandizement. The toxicity of the Tweetster.
Right at this moment the “debate” between him and Uncle Joe is being broadcast in the other room. It is unbearable. Everything the man says is not just a lie; it’s an insane lie. NOTHING he says is true…NOTHING, not a whit, not even a single word. Ever. No wonder the Republicans are all crazy, and no wonder our entire world is poised on the brink of destruction.
The growing feeling in a lot of our guts is that EVERYTHING depends on whether or not Judge Merchan sends the Tweetster to jail. My personal desired outcome is that 1) he gets a month in jail for each of the counts of which he has been convicted, and 2) that he is barred from public speaking for the entire period. No tweets, no interviews, no TV, no film, no radio…you know, like anyone else in forced confinement.
It’s not because I want him or anyone else to suffer. It’s because all the rest of us on the planet need a break, and because in the terrifying event that he should somehow get back in the White House it will mean the End of the World. Yes, seriously, the end of human life in this little corner of the Universe for sure, and probably most species bigger than a pea.
Because he is now the tool of a much larger conspiracy to destroy our democracy completely, including tearing up the Constitution, ending elections at every level, and turning our democracy into a dystopian Fascist state controlled entirely by and for radical white Christian men with Bibles and MBA’s. They don’t know and don’t care about climate change, environmental protection, fairness, justice, or science.
Yes, I am very pessimistic. Which is why Judge Merchan may be the only person in the world who can save the Future. Not to, you know, put any pressure on him…
Yes, it’s times like these that bring friends together for spirited chats in the friendly atmosphere of a neighborhood wine shop!
lummi island wine tasting June 21-22 ’24 summer solstice
Hours, June 21-22 ’24
Fridays 4-6 pm Saturdays 3-5 pm
Credit: György Soponyai/Royal Museums Greenwich/Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2021
Summer Solstice 2024 is happening as we write on Thursday, June 20. This is the moment when the sun is momentarily directly above the Tropic of Cancer, the highest latitude it achieves each year, and the longest day of the year between the moment of sunrise and the moment of sunset.
Some cultures also call this Midsummer, halfway between the Spring and Fall Equinox. The dotted lines show the paths of the sun on the solstices and equinox.
This year is particularly interesting because it is the earliest solstice since 1796, when George Washington was President of the brand-new USA. For a comprehensive and quite interesting explanation of the elusive nature of measuring calendar days, check this out at Bigthink.com.
Friday Bread This Week
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 add great flavor and crunch. And just a little honey for some sweetness. – $5/loaf
Polenta Levain – Also made with a levain, known as sourdough, 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 bread is a nice rustic loaf with great corn flavor. – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Gibassiers – A traditional french pastry recipe from southern France. Made with a delicious sweet dough full of milk, butter, eggs and olive oil, with orange flower water, candied orange peel and anise seed. After baking they are brushed with melted butter and sprinkled with more sugar. – 2/$5
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday Janice emails the week’s bread offering to her mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday 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 at least a week before visiting!
This week’s wine tasting
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!
La Vielle Ferme Rouge ’22 France $11
Great drinkability, with seductive bouquet of red fruit, spices, and cherries, well balanced palate full of delicacy, freshness, and very soft tannins.
Hess Paso Robles Cabernet Sauvignon ’21 California $26
Intense aromas of bright red cherry and raspberry, followed by notes of cedar and black pepper accompanied by layers of juicy, full raspberry notes, smooth tannins, and lingering finish of chocolate and roasted espresso.”
Economics of the Heart: Supreme Court Vs. The Constitution
davinci – generated image
It is now plain to see just how effective Leonard Leo and Republicans have been over the last several decades in transforming America from a nation of laws into an autocratic Christian State. These successes correlate closely with the loading of the Supreme Court with Catholics and far-right Protestants over the past twenty years.
These are the wonderful people who abandoned protection of everyone’s Constitutional rights for the whims of ultra-rich, ultra-self-entitled billionaires. These are the Men (and woman) in Black who brought us Citizens United (changing “one person, one vote” to “one dollar, one vote”); Hobby Lobby (legalizing prejudicial discrimination against selected subgroups of customers), and Dobbs (reversing the long-established precedent of a woman’s Right to make private choices about her own body.)
Our present situation is the result of what we might call Supreme Court gerrymandering by Leonard Leo and his forced-birth police, who seem to have taken control of every Red State government. Creepy stuff, reminiscent of Star Trek’s Borg phrase, “Resistance is Futile,” which serves to instill a sense of fear and hopelessness in their adversaries.
This self-centered unwillingness to negotiate proclaims that fighting back is not only futile but also a waste of effort and resources, and underscores the Borg’s relentless, ruthless nature and unwavering objective of assimilating all individuality into their hive collective. This is exactly the same tyrannical mindset that led Mitch McConnell to break from many decades of precedent by refusing to bring Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Senate floor after Scalia’s passing for being “too close to a election” (nearly a year), but brought Barrett’s nomination to the floor mere days before an election.
For most of our lives we elders have held the Supreme Court in high esteem, relatively faithful and conscientious arbiters of the nuances of a Constitution we all respect and to which many of us have sworn oaths to protect and defend. But now the Court has become deeply entwined with the politics of Leonard Leo, the Christian Right, and increasingly authoritarian Maga Republicans.
These issues led to an assessment by the Harvard Law Review of the need for reforms in general and two arguments for reform in particular because first, some of the Court’s recent decisions have been substantively so wrong that some intervention is needed to undo them and avert similar decisions in the future; and second, existing formal arguments for Court reform identify a set of changes, consistent with widely held political values, that would answer that need.
The arguments are heavy going for the non-lawyer, but well worth a read. They center on three perspectives for reform:
- Disempowerment: Whether or not judicial supremacy empowers the Court to undermine or entirely invalidate legislative and agency action as inconsistent with the Constitution.
- Procedural Reform: Whether the process for selecting Justices causes the Court’s decisions to be influenced by the wrong factors, such as partisan affiliation, political philosophy, or religious beliefs; and
- Political Power: Whether the growing sense of alarm about the degradation of the nomination and selection process has raised a sufficient sense of alarm and dissatisfaction about the Court’s recent actions to require reforms.
lummi island wine tasting june 14-15 ’24
Drydock Hours June 14-15
Our trusty Whatcom Chief is scheduled to be back in service this weekend, with no service for several hours while docks are re-adapted back to vehicle service.
The wine shop will remain OPEN for wine tasting and sales as usual through June:
Fridays 4-6 pm Saturdays 3-5 pm
Friday Bread This Week
Kamut Levain – Kamut, aka khorasan wheat, is an ancient grain with more protein than conventional wheat that some people find more digestible. The bread is made with a levain fermented overnight before mixing with with bread flour and fresh milled whole kamut flour. It has a nutty, rich flavor and makes a golden color. – $5/loaf
Walnut Raisin Levain – A bread I haven’t made for a long time. Has a nice mix of bread flour and freshly milled whole wheat and whole rye. The addition of raisins and toasted walnuts makes for a very flavorful bread – $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. – 2/$5
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday Janice emails the week’s bread offering to her mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday 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 at least a week before visiting!
This week’s wine tasting
Natura Rose ’21 Chile $12
Cold-soaked before pressing and cold-fermented on the skins to develop rich and nuanced aromas and flavors of grassy lime, tropical fruits, and lychee, with a crisp, lingering finish…a long-time local favorite.
Riebeek Pinotage ’21 South Africa $14
Cold soaked overnight and fermented on the lees in 80% French and 20% American oak, and blended with unoaked wine to enhance fresh fruity flavors.
Jacob Williams Syrah ’21 Washington $34
Hand-destemmed, open-top fermentation, manual punchdowns, 11 months in 12% new American oak; earthy aromas of crushed gravel and a juicy blue- fruit palate with flavors of red pepper berries and spicy finish.
Mar a Lago Update: Freedom Of Religion ≡ Freedom From Religion *
*The mathematical symbol “≡” implies that an equation is also an “identity,” where each side of the equation statement says exactly the same thing in a different way.
We bring up this point because a central element in the political consternation in which our country has been embroiled since the sixties has been the deliberate and toxic intrusion of race and religion into politics by Republicans. This began in earnest with Goldwater’s “Southern Strategy” in the sixties to woo White southern Democrats with the implicit racism of “states’ rights” and “law and order.” That resulted in a massive shift of Southern Democrats becoming very conservative Republicans. read more
In the introduction to her book White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, Anthea Butler says it is “a racism that binds and blinds many white American evangelicals to the vilification of Muslims, Latinos, and African Americans.” This is not the philosophy of Jesus. This is the philosophy of self-proclaimed autocratic white men whose aims are far more political than spiritual. And it is this single element of our political reality that drives Maga Republicans toward the Tweetster.
For ten years now his constant hateful tweets, rallies, insults, and anger-mongering has filled media world-wide with propaganda confirming all the worst paranoid fears of his gullible base. They listen, entranced and soothed by his constant lies, and donates every time he touches any of their defensive hot-spot fears about blacks, Latinos, immigrants, or Democrats. This is the show that brought the Tweetster to the White House (with a little help from election-rigging). And remember, the Washington Post documented some 25,000 lies, one by one, told to us by the Tweetster while he was playing President. The Post stopped counting, but the lies never stop.
And so we find ourselves facing another Presidential election in a few months with the Tweetster a likely candidate who happens to be awaiting sentencing after conviction in one of four criminal trials brought against him associated with his attempted coup in 2020. And as if that isn’t plenty to try to get your head around, in the meantime we have learned about major ethics breaches in our federal judicial system that have been keeping both the Tweetster and Supreme Court justices from facing legal accountability for violations of both the letter and the spirit of our Constitutional rules.
Below are some recent developments worth reading about amid all this chaos.
1. Alito interview with undercover journalist Lauren Windsor (click to open)
The story has pretty much gone viral in the last couple of days based on casual conversations a young reporter had with Alito and his wife at the Supreme Court Historical Society Annual Dinner last week. The upshot is that they took her for a sympathetic ear (not a journalist) and confided disturbing details about their prejudices. The unavoidable takeaway is that Alito is committed to enshrining his religious/philosophical views into upcoming decisions involving matters about which he has obvious conflicts of interest.
Both he and Justice Thomas have already ruled on many cases in favor of extremely wealthy men from whom they have accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in expensive gifts. This is in obvious violation of the Justice Dept. rule that justices are obligated to disclose financial gifts and to recuse themselves from any case which their participation might invoke concerns about their impartiality. Both judges have indicated they will not recuse in important upcoming cases in which they have obvious conflicts. And that is a Problem.
2. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)
Over many months now, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has dug deeply into ethics problems at the Supreme Court and made numerous videos and interviews on news programs. He has been dedicated to finding a way for Congress to get the Court follow even the modest rules already in place (such as recusing themselves from any case in which their presence might suggest even the possibility of bias. Here is a link to a very detailed and interesting interview between Sen. Whitehouse and Nicolle Wallace just yesterday on where we are and where we need to go with this issue.
3. In the same vein, here is a related interview between Chris Hayes and Reps Raskin and Occasio-Cortes on the House view of the same Supreme Court issues. The key problem, obviously, is that as long as Republicans control the House, there is unlikely to be any legislation to require Justices to act responsibly, ethically, and, well, justly. What is clear is that Democrats in both the House and the Senate are working hard to tighten ethics rules on SC Justices, because as the voting records of both Alito and Thomas imply, both have demonstrated disregard for public concerns about cronyism and outright bribery.
4. Finally, we close with this interesting piece from Politico about measuring bias of SC justices. It proposes that the current Court is made up of three groups of relatively like-minded justices who often agree with each other, depending on the cases. Their agreement or disagreement depends on two kinds of alignment, institutionalism (how much a justice considers implications beyond the facts and law of the specific case) and ideology (liberal/conservative).
One takeaway is that many decisions have been unanimous or nearly so, and generally are not controversial. The other is that the radical views of Thomas and Alito are the most toxic most of the time, and there MUST BE functional, binding, enforceable ethical standards if the Court is to reclaim the public trust and confidence.
2072 Granger Way