lummi island wine tasting march 29-30 ’24
Hours this week…
Friday 4-6 pm Saturday 3-5 pm
more signs of Spring…ahhhh
This week’s wine tasting
We are trying something new this weekend that we hope will be fun and interesting: six wines we are sampling from Cinder Winery in Idaho. This came about after new friend of the wine shop Tom B, a club member there, shared some recent arrivals with us and everyone found them tasty! The winery sent us one each of six different wines, so we will pour three on Friday and 3 on Saturday:
Friday:
Cinder Dry Viognier ’22 Aromas of lemon gelato and jasmine, vibrant citrus, enduring fruity finish, and well-rounded structure.
Cinder Malbec ’20 Notes of white tea and bing cherry, robust red fruit flavors w/hints of leather, juniper, cranberry and cinnamon.
Cinder Syrah ’22 Boysenberry and vanilla aromas, palate of toasted peppercorn, fresh blackberries, silky finish w/hints of molasses and smoked meats.
Saturday:
- Cinder Rosé of Cinsault ’22 Delicately nuanced color with floral, citrus, and honeydew melon aromas; light palate of red fruit, lemon balm notes & crisp finish.
- Cinder Valentina ’21 Cab, Merlot, Malbec; Aromas and flavors of bing cherry, espresso bean, vanilla, & thyme; medium bodied with a smooth, rich texture.
- Cinder Rowen ’21 Syrah, Mourvedre, Cinsault blend; Aromas and flavors of sour cherry, tart plum, crushed herbs & tobacco, with bright, long finish.
Friday Bread This Week
Italian Breakfast Bread – A sweetly delicious bread! Made with bread flour, eggs, yogurt, a little sugar and vanilla, with dried cranberries, golden raisins, and candied lemon peel. Perfect for breakfast toast or how about some Easter morning French Toast!? – $5/loaf
Colomba di Pasqua (aka ‘Easter Dove’): A traditional Italian Easter cake similar to Christmas panettone. Made with a sweet Italian levain, known as a lievito madre, kept at a warm temperature for a sweet, cake-like dough rather than a sour one. Contains plenty of eggs, sugar and butter plus fresh and candied orange peel, topped with a crunchy almond/hazelnut glaze and pearl sugar before baking in a dove-shaped baking form as labor of love Easter dove! – $10/loaf
Hot Cross Buns – Uses an enriched dough with plenty of butter, sugar and eggs, with lots of of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger, balancing plenty of currants, and candied lemon, and orange peel, and topped with a flavorful paste. 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.
Economics of the Heart: Taking Bearings
Dorothea Lange: Children of Oklahoma drought refugee in migratory camp in California, 1936
Right here, right now, across our country and around the world, the combination of an ever-expanding global population and the accelerating infrastructure destruction from floods, fires, famines, and wars overlapping across the planet from climate change is creating costs faster and larger than human civilization seems willing to recognize and address. Things are falling apart faster and on such an accelerating global scale that our collective abilities, will, intelligence, and commitment seem increasingly unlikely to save either ourselves or our planet from annihilation of our own making.
Here we are in 2024, after some Five Decades of concurring research findings about the existential threat posed by global warming, and still we are being stonewalled by deliberate long-term corporate denial (“Greenwashing is our most important product!”), and not until very recently has a significant proportion of our population been waking up to the magnitude and immediacy of these massive, overlapping, and interlinked existential threats.
It should not be lost on anyone that right here in our own country, for the last fifty years one entire political party has based its entire “platform” on being avidly in favor of anything that increased short-term corporate profits, executive salaries, and stock prices, and equally against taxing big business or the billionaire owners and executives who own them, and at the same time increasing taxes and decreasing benefits for a struggling middle class and the perennially poor. This “Robber Baron” philosophy goes back to the Industrial Revolution in England, where an old cartoon of two top-hatted gentlemen on an evening stroll along dirty streets bordering giant industrial smokestacks agreed, “There is a Great Deal of Money to be made here.”
These attitudes have been the essential Republican platform since at least 1970: “rob the poor to help the rich.” Well, the good news is that that Republican party no longer seems to exist, having now morphed into two related entities. The first and most obvious is the Tweetster’s Maga party of suckers who still think he gives a fig about them or their problems.
The second seems to have been the even more dangerous driving force behind the Tweetster’s original candidacy and its likely “steal” of the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. It by far the more dangerous, the shadowed Overlord of the Tweetster and his flunkies, a massively well-funded marriage of corporatists, fascists, and religious fundamentalists. They are not the Tweetster’s pawn; it’s the other way around, and he has no idea.
It is their platform the Tweetster has been openly touting, including doing away with the Constitution, freedom of religion, women’s rights, and environmental protections. On an international scale it seems inclined toward global domination by a strange dystopian melange of corporate hierarchy, Christian fundamentalism, and authoritarian control of everyone and everything. It would not only dismantle the United States. It would do away with “countries” altogether by making them individual Industrial Departments with their own Board-chosen Chairs– a unified global industrial network that makes its own rules for its own aims for its own reasons. And completely without mercy.
This kind of fantasy organization was at the center of the 1975 sci-fi fantasy film Rollerball, starring James Caan and John Houseman. This little chat between global hero Caan and one of a small elite of global industrial executives Houseman is one version of what we are talking about. These people may not be so much “pro-Putin” as they are some new kind of authoritarian organization in which the “workers” are completely expendable and the only goal is the maximization of profit and personal power for a very small elite.
In such a possible world (and many others), there is likely no concern at all about climate change. Its disasters, famines, wars, and destruction will cause billions of people to die in local battles for scraps, from starvation, thirst, or exposure; or simply because there is no profit in their existence. The Executives will inherit the Earth, or what’s left of it.
It’s not personal. It’s just, you know, business.
lummi island wine tasting march 22-23 ’24
Spring Hours
Fridays 4-6 pm
Saturdays 3-5 pm
This week’s wine tasting
San Martin Les 37 Rose ’21 $16 France $16
Syrah, Grenache and Mouvedre. Fresh and fruity, light and delicious; rich pink in color with bright, floral, fruity nose; fresh and substantial on the palate with good length and crisp minerality on the finish. Ah, Spring is here!
Lievlud cab sauv $16 South Africa $16
Inky purple/blue with plummy aromas of blackberry, blueberry, and cassis with nuances of chocolate and spice with lingering palate of blueberry and plum on the well developed tannins and a spice on the finish.
Torbreck Woodcutters Shiraz Australia $26
Succulent, rich aromas of dark berries and black plum with notes of sandalwood, rosemary and thyme; palate shows
soft tannins and structured, voluptuous mouthfeel from plump Shiraz berries gives this young vineyard the poise and piquancy we expect from this well-established producer.
Friday Bread Returns Next Week
Our baker is traveling this week ( annual baseball spring training trip, we hear…), no bread orders or deliveries this week.
If you are already on the mailing list you should receive the bread/pastry menu for next week by email on Sunday.
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.
Economics of the Heart: An Embarrassment of Villains
Pt 1: Even Avalon Has Its Challenges
Tuesday this week marked the end of our nearly two-year Island discussion with the County about the division of ferry cost burdens between the County-wide Road Fund and the narrowly-defined-by-statute “ferry fare box fund.” Tuesday evening the Council essentially dismissed our position entirely in favor of the County Executive’s order to go ahead and charge fare revenues for $800k of major capital renovations and cut off public insistence that such expenses are definitely NOT “regular and routine maintenance” and cannot legally be charged against fare revenue. Rather, we have argued, they must be paid from the broader County tax base along with other depreciable assets.
The upshot of Tuesday’s decision is that the County can charge any public works costs they want against ferry fares with no oversight whatsoever. (fyi, here’s my own summary of the situation sent to Council members before their meeting on Tuesday.)
Curiously, this Final Defeat is a sort of relief, in the same way as taking a break from banging your head against an impervious wall is a sort of relief. After nearly two years of community effort the Council’s sudden dismissal of islander concerns suddenly leaves us with only one option: filing suit against their flagrant violation of the County ordinance governing what costs may be charged against fares and which can’t. It’s not complicated.
But there is a sense of relief to get it, to feel it, that “resistance HAS been futile,” and that a court is the only available arbiter of the law. Stay tuned…
Pt 2: Glimmers of the Coming Apocolypse
The other issue is one we have been discussing over the last few months: the powerful and dangerous coalition of ultra-wealthy, ultra-corporate, ultra-religious conspirators who are close to realizing their socio-political wet dream of transforming the United States into an Ultra-Conservative Christian Autocratic State controlled by merciless, white, wealthy “Christian” men. These men will assume complete authority over who lives and who dies, who will have dignity and who will be punished and persecuted, who will rewarded and elevated, who will be shamed, beaten, tortured, and murdered…you know, the basic Authoritarian Recipe Book.
These are the same people who have taken over our Supreme Court, the Republican Party (or what is left of it), and become billionaires. (see this very well-constructed series of talks by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of RI.) They are the same people taking away the rights of women, non-whites, and immigrants. They either do not believe or care about individual freedom or dignity, global warming, ecosystem protection, education, health care for all, or the assertions of the Declaration of Independence that every human is endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights.
We have also discussed recently how think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, which were already “conservative,” have in the past couple of years turned very sharply to the Very Far Right, are committed to bringing the Tweetster back into power, breaking our country away from our historical allies around the world, and emulating authoritarian states like Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Saudi Arabia. And of course we have all heard the Tweetster’s promises to gut the entire federal civil service force and replace them with boneheaded authoritarian bullies with the intelligence of slice of tofu.
Folks, these are grave and deeply disturbing developments. While we watch the meltdown of the Tweetster, these Far Right agents seem intent on launching their “revolution” soon, this year, and taking over, with him or without him. The current obvious implosion of the Tweetster side be side with the continuing consolidation of power by the enemies of democracy in our country are not and never have been about the Tweetster. He has just been their wiling barker, and he did his job well: his follower are all now in a deep trance, reinforced 24/7 by cable news and talk radio.
All our lives we have accepted that periodically whole populations of sweet little lemmings, for no particular reason, commit mass suicide by throwing themselves off perfectly supportive cliffs into a deadly ocean. Why? Common hysteria? Drugs? Jumped or Pushed? Can we believe the story pushed by the handful of survivors (naw, they wuz crazy, man, they just jumped…)
So here we are with a growing population of people being brainwashed online to believe that liberal thought is their enemy, that freedom of anyone is a danger to everyone. Therefore, it seems reasonable to be curious about how we can respond as a community, a State, a nation (or a County!) to this level of psychoemotional manipulation by a 24/7 audio-visual barrage of lies, from well-funded, predatory manipulators now 30 years down their road to abolish liberal thinking completely. Just like 1984. Only way worse!
On that note, a reminder we are now on Spring hours, open Friday (4-6) and Saturday (3-5) for wine tasting, sales, and conversation.
Y’all come on by now, heah…?
lummi island wine tasting mar 2-3 ’24
Spring Hours
- Fridays 4-6 pm
- Saturdays 3-5 pm
ahh, more signs of spring…
This week’s wine tasting
Bodega Garzon Albarino ’21 Uruguay $15
Pale yellow with greenish reflections, this Albariño is intense in the nose, with peach and citrus notes. The freshness and minerality mid-palate is superb, with remarkable acidity and a round, crisp finish. A lovely wine at a bargain price!
Angeline Cab Sauv ’21 California $16
Fruit-forward, easy-to-drink style with aromas of lush cherry, cassis, and plum and rich cherry and plum flavors with hints of vanilla and soft oak that linger on the palate and finish with complexity and length that over-delivers for the modest price.
Marchetti Villa Bonomi Conero Riserva ’19 Italy $27
100% Sangiovese from Montepulciano, aged 16 mos. in barriques and 12 mos. in bottle; shows intense floral bouquet, intense, nuanced flavors; ripe, pleasing tannins, and satisfying finish.
Friday Bread Pickup This Week
Pain au Levain – Made with a nice mix of bread flour and freshly milled whole wheat and rye flours. After building the sourdough 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. A great all around bread – $5/loaf
Cinnamon Raisin – Made with a poolish of bread and fresh milled rye flour that is fermented overnight before the final dough is mixed with bread flour and freshly milled whole wheat as well as rolled oats. Some honey for sweetness, a little milk for a tender crumb and loaded with raisins and a healthy dose of cinnamon. This is not a rich sweet bread with a swirl of cinnamon sugar, instead the cinnamon is mixed into the dough and flavors the entire bread. It is a hearty rustic loaf. Great for breakfast toast, even better for french toast – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Individual Cinnamon Rolls – Made with a rich sweet roll dough 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!! – 2/$5
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.
Economics of the Heart: The Ominous Resurgence of Vapid Pragmatism
“Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump – Caricatures” by DonkeyHotey is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Let’s face it, the world is going to Hell around us. And the forces pushing it there have been morphing since the Sixties, from Nixon to Reagan, Bushes I and II, and the Tweetster. You will recall that all of them, under the auspices of economic freedom, found ways to withhold federal money for the poor, the sick, the disturbed. The needy of all stripes were systemically thrown off the bus, out of the lifeboat, or onto the streets to fend for themselves. “No sir, no more aid for “welfare queens,” those single moms with five kids, ripping us off for another pack of cigarettes as they tried to house and feed a family. Seriously, that was a thing in Gov. Reagan’s California in the late 60’s.
Indeed, the sixties began an ever-evolving system of reactionary “backlashes” against interlopers who might cross unmarked class boundaries, including a range of heterosexual, homosexual, ethnic, gender, or self-sufficiency credentials. And let’s include the many ways White Republicans responded to the Obama Presidency.
Fast forward to today, and we see the Tweetster slipping out of the many sets of cuffs he so richly deserves because he is self-entitled to Special Privileges, like grabbing women by private parts, stripping rights from everyone who is not a white, Christian, America-born male, and bending every rule, every principle, every guideline of integrity to acquire one more penny, bit of influence, advantage, or perk, even from (perhaps “especially from”) those who have been disadvantaged by the same rules that have advantaged them.
We see this across the Red States and across the world in countless local hierarchies of “star-bellied sneetches” vs. “plain-bellied sneetches.” It’s the way we are or what we become if we don’t have an effective magnet in our moral compasses.
This all comes up tonight after attending yet another unproductive ferry committee meeting with County Public Works, which conducts the financial levers of costs vs. fare revenues in a consistently opaque way. So tonight’s insight is that, “ah, we finally get it that when you serve Whatever Company, public, private, or government, your loyalty is increasingly to the Company and its parochial interests, not to some broader principle of service or equity or fairness or justice to, you know, the collective welfare.
It is always a disturbing disappointment to encounter these petty or self-serving loyalties, evasive rationales, or deliberate prevarications in a dialogue aimed at achieving a common purpose. So we need constantly to distinguish in any particular moment when we are acting from principle and when we are acting from expediency.
lummi island wine tasting ides of March ’24
Spring Hours
- Fridays 4-6 pm
- Saturdays 3-5 pm
ahh, more signs of spring…
This week’s wine tasting
Bodega Garzon Albarino ’21 Uruguay $15
Pale yellow with greenish reflections, this Albariño is intense in the nose, with peach and citrus notes. The freshness and minerality mid-palate is superb, with remarkable acidity and a round, crisp finish. A lovely wine at a bargain price!
Angeline Cab Sauv ’21 California $16
Fruit-forward, easy-to-drink style with aromas of lush cherry, cassis, and plum and rich cherry and plum flavors with hints of vanilla and soft oak that linger on the palate and finish with complexity and length that over-delivers for the modest price.
Marchetti Villa Bonomi Conero Riserva ’19 Italy $27
100% Sangiovese from Montepulciano, aged 16 mos. in barriques and 12 mos. in bottle; shows intense floral bouquet, intense, nuanced flavors; ripe, pleasing tannins, and satisfying finish.
Friday Bread Pickup This Week
Pain au Levain – Made with a nice mix of bread flour and freshly milled whole wheat and rye flours. After building the sourdough 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. A great all around bread – $5/loaf
Cinnamon Raisin – Made with a poolish of bread and fresh milled rye flour that is fermented overnight before the final dough is mixed with bread flour and freshly milled whole wheat as well as rolled oats. Some honey for sweetness, a little milk for a tender crumb and loaded with raisins and a healthy dose of cinnamon. This is not a rich sweet bread with a swirl of cinnamon sugar, instead the cinnamon is mixed into the dough and flavors the entire bread. It is a hearty rustic loaf. Great for breakfast toast, even better for french toast – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Individual Cinnamon Rolls – Made with a rich sweet roll dough 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!! – 2/$5
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.
Economics of the Heart: The Ominous Resurgence of Vapid Pragmatism
“Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump – Caricatures” by DonkeyHotey is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Let’s face it, the world is going to Hell around us. And the forces pushing it there have been morphing since the Sixties, from Nixon to Reagan, Bushes I and II, and the Tweetster. You will recall that all of them, under the auspices of economic freedom, found ways to withhold federal money for the poor, the sick, the disturbed. The needy of all stripes were systemically thrown off the bus, out of the lifeboat, or onto the streets to fend for themselves. “No sir, no more aid for “welfare queens,” those single moms with five kids, ripping us off for another pack of cigarettes as they tried to house and feed a family. Seriously, that was a thing in Gov. Reagan’s California in the late 60’s.
Indeed, the sixties began an ever-evolving system of reactionary “backlashes” against interlopers who might cross unmarked class boundaries, including a range of heterosexual, homosexual, ethnic, gender, or self-sufficiency credentials. And let’s include the many ways White Republicans responded to the Obama Presidency.
Fast forward to today, and we see the Tweetster slipping out of the many sets of cuffs he so richly deserves because he is self-entitled to Special Privileges, like grabbing women by private parts, stripping rights from everyone who is not a white, Christian, America-born male, and bending every rule, every principle, every guideline of integrity to acquire one more penny, bit of influence, advantage, or perk, even from (perhaps “especially from”) those who have been disadvantaged by the same rules that have advantaged them.
We see this across the Red States and across the world in countless local hierarchies of “star-bellied sneetches” vs. “plain-bellied sneetches.” It’s the way we are or what we become if we don’t have an effective magnet in our moral compasses.
This all comes up tonight after attending yet another unproductive ferry committee meeting with County Public Works, which conducts the financial levers of costs vs. fare revenues in a consistently opaque way. So tonight’s insight is that, “ah, we finally get it that when you serve Whatever Company, public, private, or government, your loyalty is increasingly to the Company and its parochial interests, not to some broader principle of service or equity or fairness or justice to, you know, the collective welfare.
It is always a disturbing disappointment to encounter these petty or self-serving loyalties, evasive rationales, or deliberate prevarications in a dialogue aimed at achieving a common purpose. So we need constantly to distinguish in any particular moment when we are acting from principle and when we are acting from expediency.
2072 Granger Way