lummi island wine tasting oct 6 ’23
Fall Hours begin this weekend:
Open Friday 4-6
This week’s wine tasting
morning moonset over Orcas
Phantom Chardonnay ’21 California $15
Entices with its rich layers of green apple and pear that lead into spicy flavors of freshly baked apple pie, while barrel fermentation imparts a creamy, luscious mouthfeel finishing with sweet notes of vanilla and melted caramel.
Quinta Do Vallado Douro Red ’14 Portugal $16
Blend of Touriga Franca, Touriga Nacional,Tinta Roriz, Sousão; lovely, floral black cherry and black currant fruit; supple yet structured with notes of pepper, meat, and a lovely herbal twist.
Sineann Cabernet Sauvignon ’17 Oregon $27
Classic Columbia Valley cab– dark, well-balanced, food friendly, and age-worthy. “We easily could have vineyard-designated any of the components of this Cabernet; we chose instead to blend it into this gorgeous wine. You will rarely experience a wine this good that costs this little!”
NO Friday Bread Pickup This Week!
Sorry, as all of you on the bread mailing list already know, our baker has conflicting obligations this week, so (sniff) NO bread Friday this week. 😕
Wine of the Week: Sineann Cabernet Sauvignon ’17 Oregon $27
The Sineann Winery is located just across the road from Oregon’s Champoeg State Park. We generally pop in to taste wine several times a year when we are visiting the park with our trailer. We still have a handful of these from our visit last year.
The winemaker gives it a glowing description:
Our 2017 Columbia Valley Cabernet is made up of Cabernet Sauvignon, and only Cabernet Sauvignon, from Phinny Hill Vineyards.We easily could have vineyard-designated any of the components of this Cabernet, but we chose instead to blend it into this gorgeous wine. You will rarely experience a wine this good that costs this little!
This wine is classic example of what a well-crafted Columbia Valley Cab can be – dark, well-balanced, food-friendly, will age very well, and a great value!
Economics of the Heart: Suicide By Plastic
courtesy opb.org
For several years PBS has been doing specials on how billions of tons of plastic have been created by the global petroleum/chemical industry. We old-timers remember vividly this passing scene in 1967 film The Graduate in which the young Dustin Hoffman character was pulled aside for some advice about a career…in Plastics. Well, as we all know, the fellow’s prediction was absolutely true: the plastics industry would take off and take over the world. Sure, it has made a lot of people very rich, turned a lot of little kids’ rooms into Lego-riddled mine fields, and made $gazillions for a giant industry. But at what cost?
Over the next several decades plastic bags replaced paper ones, followed by plastic car interiors, bottles, dishes, trash cans, dinnerware, straws…pretty much anything could be and therefore has been made of the stuff. And it will last virtually forever, even millions of years after the grinding wheels of time turn it all to powder, each molecule will still be intact. And for the most part, it was curiously cheap to produce (if you don’t count the environmental damage), cheaper than paper, leather, glass, you name it, all quite magical, all these wonders from just your basic hydrocarbons made from, you know, old dead things from a very long time ago.
While a bunch of us started being concerned about these trends by the early seventies, the petroleum industry hadn’t yet even shifted into second gear. A glance at this chart shows that plastic production has been steadily accelerating– increasing at a slightly increasing rate –for the last seventy years, passing five hundred million tons per year in 2020. So if you want to figure out how much plastic has been made from the beginning, you have to add all those annual production numbers since 1950, visually represented by the area under the curve, a total of around 160 billion tons of the stuff. All of is still sitting around us on our dear planet’s surface, in our air, in our waters all over the globe, and in our bodies.
Awareness and concern about the increasingly visible costs of pollution grew in the sixties, ushered in the first Earth Day in 1971, and became a factor in how a lot of us chose our college and grad school majors– in my case marine resource economics. Still, though the early seventies saw a lot of progressive ideas and accomplishments, the decade became politically more and more cool toward environmental awareness and concern, ultimately ushering in forty years of Reaganism, during which all attempts at environmental maintenance and improvement met fierce opposition from the Reagan Right.
About fifteen years ago, when I was involved for a couple of years with designing some pilot courses as a basis for a new Institute of Sustainability at WWU, I was introduced to this charming video from the Story of Stuff Institute and the Tides Foundation. This film was an engaging introduction to the field of environmental economics, which has “inconveniently,” as Al Gore put it, told the truth about the fact that, for example, a large proportion of GNP, which Business insists is the Holy Grail we want to maximize, includes a lot of costs to our health, our ecosystems, our waters, habitats, and the rapidly escalating destruction we are seeing from ever intensifying fires, winds, floods, tornadoes, landslides, heat waves, and sea level rise from global climate change.
By 2020 and we were seeing scenes all over the world like this one of a sea turtle with a discarded rod (plastic?) up its nostril, the cost of just one tiny bit from the millions of tons of plastic waste building up all over the world’s lands and waters and accumulating in the food chain.
PBS has produced a number of videos in recent years, as this search reveals.
lummi island wine tasting sept 29-30 ’23
Hours this weekend:
Open Friday & Saturday, September 29-30, 4-6 pm
This week’s wine tasting
Norway maple
Clos St. Magdeleine Cassis Blanc ’21 France $36
40% Marsanne, 30% Ugni blanc, 25% Clairette, and 5% Bourboulenc; Rich aromas with salty traces of garrigue and peaches; full and fleshy on the palate with a savory minerality, a cleansing, salty-stony flavor and, and a honeyed, dry finish. Unique and delicious!
Marietta Old Vine Red ’22 California
Zinfandel-based red blend from Geyserville with lovely bright plum fruit, dark and focused notes of briar and black tea, a perfect balance of big flavor and vibrant sophistication, with medium body, mouth of sweet spice and velvety tannins to pair with almost any meal or occasion.
Pomum Red ’18 Washington $18
50% Cab Sauv, 25% Cab Franc, 22% Merlot, 3% Carmenere from Pomum’s Konnowac vineyard; aromas of red fruit-leather and exotic spices; flavors of black cherry, cranberry, and garrigue; a long-time favorite here at the wine gallery; fermented in small fermenters and sat on the skins in clay Tinajas for 12 months before being pressed.
Friday Bread Pickup This Week
Kamut Levain – Kamut, aka khorasan wheat, is an ancient, protein-rich grain discovered in a cave in Iran in the 70’s that many people who can’t tolerate wheat find more digestible. This bread is made with a levain that is fermented overnight before being mixed with with bread flour and fresh milled whole kamut flour. It has a nutty, rich flavor and makes a golden color loaf. – $5/loaf
Barley & Rye w/ Pumpkin Seeds – Made with a levain that is fermented overnight before the final dough is mixed with a nice mix of bread flour and fresh milled rye, barley and whole wheat flours. Some buttermilk makes for a tender crumb, honey for sweetness and toasted pumpkin seedsfor flavor and texture. – $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 for baking. These are my favorites! As always, quantities are limited, be sure to get your order in early – 2/$5
To get on the bread order list, click the “Contact Us” link above and fill out the form. Each week’s bread menu is sent to the list each Sunday, for ordering by Tuesday, for pickup on Friday. Simple, right..? If you will be visiting the island and would like to order bread for your visit, at least a week’s notice is recommended for pickup the following Friday.
Wine of the Week: Marietta Old Vine Red ’22
This wine is billed as a sort of a “field blend,” but not exactly. A true field blend is when several varietals are planted in the same vineyard and exposed to the same soil, climate, and water conditions over the same growing season, and can be harvested, crushed, fermented, aged and blended together.
OVR a blend of Zinfandel, Cabernet, Petite Sirah, and Syrah from different vineyards near Geyserville (California) near the north end of the Dry Creek Valley, and “field blend” is a bit of a misnomer. Also, we know nothing about the differences among the vineyards these varietals come from, but whatever we call it, it is a festive and enjoyable wine at a modest price.
Predominantly Zinfandel, this wine combines hand selected fruit from multiple vineyards, resulting in a unique, bright red wine with solid structure. For decades the groundbreaking combination of grape varieties and multiple vintages in this wine has set the bar and blazed the path for red blends all throughout North America.
Marietta Old Vine Red ’22
A pleasantly bright and lively red wine, plump with blackberries and black cherries. Secondary notes of wild mint, dusty earth and alluring hints of mocha; comforting and familiar, ago-to wine for all occasions.
Economics of the Heart: The War on Critical Thinking
Every creature has some form of sensory discrimination that allows it to survive. We are gifted with a unique nervous system that lets us tell this from that, one from two, gray from black, mine from yours, and right from wrong. Our ability to think, especially to think critically, depends entirely on our ability to observe and make meaning from differences in quantities and qualities of the world around us, and to communicate about them with each other through language.
The abilities to differentiate and reason are the primary characteristic of critical thinking. We all have the sensory ability to discriminate tastes (salty, sweet, sour), feelings (pleasant, unpleasant), and numbers (more, less), and the cognitive ability to tell truth from lies and fact from fiction. We can also form ideas, execute plans, and evaluate and learn from the results. These abilities constitute what is generally known as “critical thinking,” and is the whole point of maturation in general and education in particular.
The most detailed model for the development of intellectual maturity was put forth by William Perry from data gathered back around 1960. Perry’s research found that in general, a student’s college experience could be viewed as “an intellectual Pilgrim’s Progress” in which the student’s way of thinking evolved through four “stages” from a world of binary choices into a world of complex contexts with which to differentiate ever more nuanced distinctions.
Perry observed that beginning college students generally began at Level 1, Duality, a world of opposites: (right/wrong, good/bad). With study and reflection, that view gradually broadened over a couple of years to Multiplicity, which opened a space to hang out with the curious uncertainty of “don’t know for sure.” Over time these broaden to Mode 3, a relativistic layer of “it depends.” The evolution to Level 4, as it turns out, is then a major developmental step in critical thinking with “a fundamental transformation of one’s perspective from a vision of the world as essentially dualistic, to a world as essentially relativistic and context-bound with relatively few right/wrong exceptions.”
The Big Takeaway here is that human beings have been shown to hang out at Levels 1-2 until they learn otherwise from increasing age, education, and/or experience. Which brings us to Maga Republicans. Who are they? According to a study from UW, they have the following characteristics, and they are a mortal threat to our democracy.
- Demographics: MAGA supporters are older, Christian, retired men, the same base as the Capitol riots, with about half middle-class by income, and 1/3 by education.
- Geography: From every state, in proportion to population density from urban to rural;
- Affiliations: 85% support gun rights; 60% support both charities and pro-police groups; 50% support pro-life groups; 38% ‘stop the steal’ ; 23% pro-militia movement;
- Political Activism: Over 75% have signed a petition, contacted representatives, or boycotted, 60% donated $, 50% attended meetings or rallies; nearly 100% voted in every election; nearly all distrust 2020 election results, and believe that voting is too easy.
- Pandemic and Paranoia: 90% agree: COVID rules over-reactive, COVID a Chinese bioweapon, Trump honest about pandemic.
- Race: Large majority disagree that slavery made upward mobility or achieving their potential more difficult for blacks, while agreeing blacks would be doing as well as whites if they tried and should work their way up like other minorities.
- Gender: Large majority agree women interpret innocent remarks as sexist, seek special favors, make unreasonable demands of men, and seek more power than men.
- Immigration: majority believe immigrants change our culture for the worse and break more laws.
The UW analysis ends with this: “These findings are but the tip of the proverbial iceberg. We have much more to share. For us, the implications are clear: our country is in grave danger since one of the two major parties is essentially captured by the MAGA movement. We invite you to draw your own conclusions from these preliminary findings.”
All of this reminds me of a cartoon I saw many years ago that seems to capture our present predicament.
Picture an old man sitting on a park bench feeding the “pigeons” from a bag of popcorn. Among the pigeons is a man wearing a very unconvincing fake beak and fake wings to whom the man keeps throwing popcorn, while a concerned passerby is whispering into the old man’s ear, “Sir…that man is making a fool of you!” Well, Maga is the fake bird, and it is making fools of everyone who still believes it is operating in their interest.
Today’s insight is that everything about Maga is an all-out attack on Critical Thinking and the Truth. And without critical thinking, a lot of it, with a firm focus on restoring climate stability with the cooperation of every living person, every living thing on our planet may be doomed. Seriously…this is not a drill.
lummi island wine tasting sept ’23 autumn equinox
Hours this weekend:
Open Friday & Saturday, September 21-22, 4-6 pm
– Mike in his Island Parade clown suit!
This week’s wine tasting
Ryan Patrick Rock Island Chardonnay ’20 Washington $16
Aromas and flavors of wildflowers, crisp apples, honey, and cinnamon roll with a round, crisp, body and a graceful finish of sumac-spiced croutons.
La Atalaya del Camino ’20 Spain $15
Intense aromas, fruit, and elegance on the nose with a distinct spiciness and a touch of floral notes. Rich and meaty structure, with rich dark fruits and hints of spice. Smooth and pleasant long finish.
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.
NO Friday Bread Pickup This Week!
Whole Wheat Levain – Made with a sourdough starter that is built up over several days before a levain is made and fermented overnight in the refrigerator. This long slow process allows the fermentation process to start and the gluten to start developing; it has a ‘toothy’ crumb, great texture and flavor and a nice crisp crust. – $5/loaf
Semolina w/ Fennel & Raisins – A levain bread made with bread flour, semolina and some fresh milled whole wheat. A little butter for a tender crumb and fennel seeds and golden raisins round out the flavors that go really well with meats and cheese – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Brioche Almond Buns – Made with a delicious brioche dough full of eggs, butter and sugar. Rolled out and spread with an almond cream filling. The almond cream is not made from pre-made almond paste, but rather is a delicious creamy filling made with lots more butter, sugar and eggs as well as almond flour. Yum! – 2 /$5
Wine of the Week: Phantom Red Blend ’20 California $17
The Bogle winery– a group of wineries these days– is a stone’s throw west of the Sacramento River, and about equidistant from Sacramento and Lodi in the Sierra foothills. It’s a big outfit, with 2000 acres of vineyards, a constellation of wine labels, and local roots tracing back to a Civil War vet and his nephew who moved to the area in the 1870’s. They grew orchards which they farmed until the Depression made them tenant farmers in nearby Clarksville. Over succeeding decades they planted vineyards, and now have an extensive portfolio of vineyards and wine labels.
“Each lot of grapes that goes into our Phantom program is hand selected from the multiple vineyards we have,” says Director of Winemaking Eric Aafedt. “We are looking for the grapes with notable quality and character to create a ‘reserve’ tier of wines.”
The best grapes are selected for the Phantom wines, and spend an extra year in 1- and 2-year-old American & French oak,” says Eric. “This time in the barrel creates a deeper concentration, a subtler touch of tannin and a richer mouthfeel for the wine.”
Phantom also has a unique and personal story to its name…”Bogle” is the Scottish word for “ghost.” Legends tell of a Phantom that stalked the hillsides of Scotland, only to travel to the New World and settle with the Bogle’s here in California. Today, sightings continue to occur at the family’s winery.
Mar a Lago Update: Climate Change, Forced Birth, and Voting Rights
Chris Hayes’ program last night made an encouraging case, based on a 538 analysis, that the political outlook is likely much better than various pundits keep implying. We all hear the Maga voices stuck in a repetitive loop of far-fetched , baseless conspiracy theories and a chronic obsession with Hunter Biden. They have no data-based arguments to support their insane Alternative Facts that somehow prove the Tweetster won the 2020 election, that the only danger to our country is Wokeness, and all the rest of it. We all see and hear it blaring every day, all day.
Everyone recalls the general fear that the 2022 election was going to be a “Republican tsunami,” a massive popular rejection of all things Democratic (or, as GOP grammarians prefer to call it, the ‘Democrat” Party). But, as we all know, while Democrats lost control of the House, they gained a small majority in the Senate and a large enough caucus in the House to have allowed the many legislative accomplishments the Biden Administration has produced in these divisive times.
The coverage focused on some thirty special elections held in the past year at varying levels and locations. The takeaway is that there no “tsunami.” In fact, in almost all cases, even in losing, the Democrat garnered far more votes than anyone had predicted. To put it another way, a lot of people Republicans were counting on (taking for granted…?) turned away from them, and that is a Pretty Big Deal.
While Republicans have gone even more Maga since 2020, much of America has moved on. While Maga is legislating forced birth for every female human being unfortunate enough to experience an undesired or life-threatening pregnancy, many American women are shouting No! A majority of women, especially young women, are not Maga, not Republican, not evangelical Christians, and are demanding the Constitutional freedom to make the religious, ethical, and practical decisions they choose.
In short, the present remnants of the Republican Party are the progeny of Reagan’s Southern strategy of race-baiting and his “trickle-down” economics that made a handful of people grotesquely wealthy at the expense of everyone else on the planet. So not only do they want to control every woman’s body to their template, they also want remove every economic safety net for the masses. Somewhere in their model is a world where a small handful of white men will own everything in a Giant Company Store that employs everyone, on which everyone depends for everything, and which maintains everyone at a minimum sustainable level.
If this sounds Dystopian, that’s because it is. Americans of all stripes are turning away from the tyranny such a model represents. Voters in many states, including Red ones, are acting to preserve the right to choose in their Constitutions, and slowing escalating damages from increasingly destructive winds, floods, heat waves, desertification, fire, and smoke damage.
Each year these damages have been getting worse, until now, this year, the entire world seems finally to be waking up to the sobering reality of the threat as many places become, first, economically uninhabitable (not worth rebuilding in the same way in the same place), and soon after, physically unlivable.
The growing question on the floor raised by the declining election performance of Republicans across a wide swath of America is whether Republicans are justified in taking for granted that the Tweetster’s voter base is also theirs. They have had no party Platform except to support whatever he says or does for nearly a decade. As mentioned above, that does not position them well with a public that is increasingly concerned about rapidly shrinking global habitability, increasing authoritarianism, and even the ability of civilization to persist.
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…
2072 Granger Way