lummi island wine tasting april 7, ’23
Hours this weekend: 4-6 pm Friday
Friday Bread Pickup This Week
courtesy www.savoringitaly.com
Colomba di Pasqua or “Easter Dove”: A traditional Italian Easter cake made with a slievito madre, a sourdough levain fed every 4 hours at a warm temperature to make it more sweet than sour. This cake-like bread also contains flour, eggs, sugar and butter, candied orange peel topped with a crunchy almond and hazelnut glaze and pearl sugar before baking. The dough is baked in a dove shaped baking form as a symbol of the Easter dove. $5/loaf
Italian Breakfast Bread – A delicious lightly sweet bread great any time of day. Made with bread flour eggs, yogurt, a little sugar and vanilla as well as dried cranberries, golden raisins, and fresh and candied lemon peel. Perfect for breakfast toast or maybe for Easter morning French Toast! – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Hot Cross Buns – An enriched dough (butter, sugar, eggs and just a hint of whole wheat). full of spices, including cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger as well as currants and candied lemon and orange peel. Topped with a flavorful paste and glazed these are a delicious traditional treat to celebrate spring. – 2/$5
To get on the bread order list, click on 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: Seghesio Zinfandel ’19 California $23
The Seghesio family has been growing zinfandel grapes in Sonoma since 1895, some five generations ago, most likely starting with cuttings from closely related primitivo vines brought from southern Italy. Zinfandel from the region has built a reputation for big, fruit-forward red wines that coat the palate and fill the senses with their plush flavors and aromas. Over the decades the winery has developed numerous single-vineyard labels, each with its own special characteristics and sometimes hefty prices.
As is the case for many top wineries, “deselected” portions of the harvest that are not selected for the single-vineyard bottlings are blended to make this annual blend, which is predictably delicious and enticing in its own way. From year to year it reliably delivers a delicious zinfandel at a modest price…and elicits an appreciative “mmmm” after the first sip….! read more…
This Week’s $10 Wine Tasting:
Chapoutier Belleruche Blanc ’20 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.
Kiona Lemberger ’20 Washington $14
Perfumed aromas with traces of orange zest and flower, with notes of blueberry; an agreeable palate that pairs particularly well with spicy foods!
Seghesio Zinfandel ’19 California $23
Aromas of deep dark fruits lead to a juicy, vibrant palate with notes of black cherry, black raspberry, fig, baking spice and fresh plum, and layered fruit flavors, finishing with supple, textured tannins and a lingering, complex finish.
Economics of the Heart: Comity and Common Purpose
Over the years we have often started this blog with a quote from economist Joan Robinson that so often seems to capture the essence of our world: “Every economic system requires a set of values, a set of rules, and a willingness in the people to carry them out.” And here is today’s lesson on the challenge of comity in the face of diverging values.
Today’s exploration is a bit of a lament on the current strained sense of comity in our little island community. Let’s begin with an old song that most of you under 75 probably never heard of, simply called MTA (click link for video). It was written in 1949 and made a famous by the Kingston Trio around 1960. As you will hear in the introduction, it is a ballad bemoaning a subway fare increase by Boston’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, bettah known back theaya in Beantown as simply “the MTA.“
Right here, right now on our not-so-idyllic-at-the-moment island, we are dealing with our own County’s controversial ferry fare increase proposal. Those of us who have studied the rationale offered for the increase do not believe the County has made a sufficiently convincing case for any fare increase at all, and a substantial proportion of the island population agrees with that view.
Nevertheless, the issue has been a political challenge right here in our own community, right here on the County Ferry Committee this writer sits on. Let’s just say that about 4.5 of the 7 members of the committee ( 5 from the island, 2 from mainland) believe that their primary responsibility is to serve the interests of the County Ferry Dept (authority figures…?), and we of the other 2.5 read our charge as an advisory committee to represent to the County Council the broad interests of the entire County, including especially our island.
Which brings us to the elusive path to comity. Of course there are times when we have disagreements with our friends. That’s when everyone’s built-up stock of comity should kick in, and kindness and reason prevail. Sadly, the “four and a half” seem to see their primary responsibility as in service to ferry management, not to the broader economic interests of the County as a whole.
At root there is something visceral and deep in our individual DNA and in the unconscious beliefs we all developed about our selves and the world from childhood experiences that makes some of us accede without question to perceived Authority, while others of us will refuse to do so without being convinced that the “authority” knows wtf they are talking about.
In any case, it is deeply troubling to find world views to be so sensitive to unconscious beliefs about autonomy and authority, and to find oneself at odds with the incomprehensible mindsets of people you thought you knew. 🙁
lummi island wine tasting march 31 ’23
Hours this weekend: 4-6 pm Friday
NO Bread Pickup This Week…it’s Annual Roadside Pickup!
Each year around the first weekend of April is the annual Roadside Cleanup. Volunteers gather at the Grange around 0930 and have a little time to socialize and enjoy one of the pastries Janice makes for the event.
Then crews form, climb into pickups, ride to their assigned stretch of road, and walk both sides to pick up any litter that has accumulated during the year before returning to base to unload, show off most amazing junk found, and enjoy the well-earned hot dogs!
To get on the bread order list, click on 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: Juggernaut Russian River Pinot Noir ’20 Sonoma $17
Notes: Cool breezes and damp fog build character in this Russian River pinot noir; graceful and vigorous, aromas of white flowers, vanilla bean, and waffle cone open to persistent flavors of dark cherry and red berries with spicy floral notes.
The Bogle winery– group of wineries these days– is a stone’s throw west of the Sacramento River, and about equidistant from Sacramento and Lodi. Bogle is a big outfit, with 2000 acres of vineyards and a family 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 and planted orchards which they lost during the Depression and became tenant farmers in nearby Clarksville.
After WWII a family member was able to buy a small holding in the same area, and for twenty years did well growing market crops like wheat and corn. The family planted their first vineyards in the late 60’s, and sold the fruit to existing wineries as the vines matured. Their first wine under the family name was released in the late 70’s.
These days they have a handful of labels: Bogle, Twenty Acres, Phantom, Juggernaut, Tanist, Dark Watchers. The “Juggernaut” series has eye-catching, creative, elaborate, and Scary labels. The cab has a very elaborate and scary lion. (watch it develop..!)
This Week’s $10 Wine Tasting:
Juggernaut Chardonnay ’21 Sonoma $17
Aromas of apple, Asian pear and lemon meringue open to flavors of stone fruit, honeysuckle and yellow plum made rich and lingering using barrel fermentation and sur lie aging; finishes with notes of vanilla bean, and butter cream with hints of baking spices and clove.
Argento Malbec ’20 Argentina $12
From organically grown grapes; deep purple hue; inviting aromas of red berries and flowers, and flavors of plum and sweet blackberry; finishes with ripe, balanced tannins– way over-delivers for its modest price.
Juggernaut Russian River Pinot Noir ’20 Sonoma
Cool breezes and damp fog build character in this Russian River pinot noir; graceful and vigorous, aromas of white flowers, vanilla bean, and waffle cone open to persistent flavors of dark cherry and red berries with spicy floral notes.
Economics of the Heart: Blood From Stones
courtesy www.silverenchantments.com
There are many well-known and well-used metaphors for it: getting blood out of a stone; robbing Peter to pay Paul; easier said than done; have your cake and eat it— the list goes on and on. All these phrases are acknowledgements of the basic economic reality of living beings: we must continually extract resources from and return waste to the same interdependent– and finite –– environment, and that requires that we all agree to a common set of shared values and a set of rules for resource allocation and behavior.
Some things can be shared, others not so much. Who gets how much of what? How is it decided? In a world of scarcity everything has elements of mine, yours, ours, and theirs that are the stuff of conflict and compromise, politics and power. This is the actual, physical, moment to moment challenge of our shared economic reality: to come up with a sustainable set of rules that we can all endorse, believe in, and support.
Trust in and commitment to a shared set values and rules is a necessary condition for the ongoing mutual trust and comity that hold an economic system together. We have seen many signs over the past decade that commitments to democracy, freedom, and fairness have been eroding both globally and within our own country. These serious political divisions are creating and maintaining stress and tension we can all feel, regardless of our politics.
Locally, though, we expect things to work differently. We feel a sense of belonging here on our little island, in our nearby mainland communities, and even our State. It’s a very good place to be, and we have grown used to a sense of mutual support and rapport with our local government agents and agencies.
So it has been challenging recently to find ourselves clashing with recent County efforts to redefine its relationship to our community from a sense of partnership to one of scapegoating and punishment. The situation is challenging in that many elements of our 60-yr old ferry and supporting infrastructure are are at the end of their useful lives and require continuing investment to keep them operational for another four or five years until a planned new vessel enters service.
Under current statute, such extraordinary expenses certainly do not qualify as the “regular and routine” maintenance expenses of which 55% must be paid for from ferry fare revenues. The statute is a compact between ferry users and the rest of the County; users pay 55% of the “regular and routine” expenses, and the County pays 45% of ops expenses (of which half are subsidized by the State) and all of capital costs, which get written off as depreciation.
But in recent months all of that has changed. The County now proposes to drop the current statute entirely and redefine operating costs as “any expense that isn’t specifically defined as a “capital expense,” in the same breath as they define “repairs” as anything they say it is. (no, we are not making this up!) It’s a breach of faith and trust and an unacceptable shifting of additional financial burden away from the 240,000 county residents to the 1000 island residents.
Basic fare economics tells us that people respond to large fare increases by making fewer trips, moving away, working more from home, or otherwise economizing on ferry travel, even moving to the mainland. Those demographic changes not only have a negative effect on our community diversity; they also will lower overall fare revenue because the people who make the most trips will leave and be replaced by more retirees and telecommuters who can ride the ferry once a week or less.
This latest proposal qualifies as a great example of an economic “Dumb Cycle:”
REVENUE DROPS –> RAISE FARES –>
RAISE FARES –> RIDERSHIP FALLS –>
RIDERSHIP FALLS –> REVENUE DROPS –> around and around and around….
lummi island wine tasting mar 24 ’23
Hours this weekend: 4-6 pm Friday only
Friday Bread Pickup This Week
Honey, Wheat, Lemon & Poppy seeds – Made with a poolish that ferments some of the flour, yeast and water, but none of the salt, overnight. This results in a very active pre-ferment which is mixed the next day with the final ingredients which includes a nice mix of bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat. Some honey, poppy seeds and freshly grated lemon peel round out the flavors in this loaf. – $5/loaf.
Flax Seed Currant Ciabatta – Made with a poolish that ferments some of the flour and water overnight before being mixed with the final ingredients which includes a nice mix of bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat and rye flours. Loaded up with flax seeds and dried currants for a delicious bread. This bread is mixed with a lot of water that makes for a very slack dough so it can’t be weighed out and shaped like other bread, it is just cut into pieces. A really flavorful artisan loaf – $5/piece
and pastry this week…
Rum Raisin Brioche: A delicious brioche dough full of eggs, butter and sugar. Filled with golden raisins and chunks of almond paste and (wait there’s more!) topped with a chocolate glaze before baking!- 2/$5
To get on the bread order list, click on 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: Toso Reserve Malbec ’19 Argentina $21
Notes: Elegant and balanced with good concentration and ripeness;focused, clean notes of blackberry, plum, and ripe, dark cherries; a plush, elegant mouthfeel, easy tannins, and lingering notes of leather and Spring soil..
Pascual Toso winery is named for its original founder, who emigrated from Italy to Argentina in 1880 (OMD, that’s 140 years ago!). Sr. Toso settled in Mendoza, and with a family history in wine making, and intrigued by the exceptional quality of the vineyards in the region, opened his first winery in San Jose in 1890.
In subsequent years he (among others!) was a pioneer in proving the exceptional terroir of the Maipu Valley, where he bought land and developed vineyards. These days the winery has planted additional Bordeaux varietals cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc, which, not surprisingly, also do very well in Mendoza.
All these many decades later, the winery has changed hands over time and is now, like an increasing proportion of wineries globally, owned by a global corporation, which often leads to declining quality. In this particular case, though, the proof is in the tasting– this wine delivers a lot of flavor for its moderate price point!
This Week’s $10 Wine Tasting:
Maryhill Winemaker’s White ’20 Washington $
Sauv Blanc, Viognier, Semillon, Albarino and Pinot Gris blend makes for a flavorful Bordeaux-style white blend; a slow, gentle press cycle ensures optimum fruit character, and each varietal partially fermented separately before blending.
Townshend Cellars T3 Red Washington $18
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.
Toso Reserve Malbec ’19 Argentina $21
Elegant and balanced with good concentration and ripeness; focused, clean notes of blackberry, plum, and ripe, dark cherries; a plush, elegant mouthfeel, easy tannins, and lingering notes of leather and Spring soil..
Economics of the Heart: The Coming Scarcity of Everything
The recently released UN report on climate change has documented a very long list of ways that we humans could theoretically slow and reverse the catastrophic effects of the climate changes that we have brought forth on our Mother planet. The report analyzes numerous scenarios of atmospheric carbon reduction in detail, and concludes that yes, is still barely possible, if we act immediately, with deep, global, and unified commitment, that we could theoretically keep global average temperature increase under 1.5°C, and, you know, save the Planet. The report then goes into great detail analyzing how we got to this critical point and the possible outcomes of various global response scenarios.
In just the last two decades climate change has already caused substantial damages and irreversible losses to terrestrial, freshwater, cryospheric (permanent ice cover), coastal, and open ocean ecosystems. Hundreds of species have already migrated or perished from heat, drought, flooding, desertification, food scarcity, or increased predation, and human communities across the world are now regularly experiencing the worst storms, flooding, winds, and heat waves on record. And they are getting worse each year. It’s Here, it’s Happening, and it Getting Worse every day.
Even the tiny increase in average sea level rise of several inches in recent years has been enough to show us that coastlines are rapidly becoming economically uninhabitable already; it only takes one super-storm during a king tide to wipe out an entire community; how many times can one afford to rebuild?
Human populations across the world are now all experiencing the destructive manifestations of their own geography. Many places, particularly in lower latititudes, face increasing scarcity of both food and water as conditions grow hotter and drier. The UN report estimates that some 3.5 billion people are trapped in these failing “geomes” (just-coined term for “geographically bounded habitats”…?) where declining rainfall and falling food production pose grim prospects for the foreseeable future.
Roughly half the world’s population currently experiences severe water scarcity for at least part of the year due to a combination of climatic and non-climatic drivers. At the same time, ocean warming and acidification are adversely affecting food production from fisheries and shellfish aquaculture in some oceanic regions. The growing geographic– and hence also ethnic, racial, and cultural–redistribution of resource availability is combining with growing scarcities of food and water, failing governance, and increasing mass mortality from thirst and hunger to condemn entire populations to struggle for basic necessities.
It would be both wonderful and very surprising if the world were able to pull together into an “all for one and one for all” commitment. The Good News is that it is our best shot at an appealing global future, and it is “possible.”
Still…given what we know about human nature from history, leading up to and including the deliberate efforts of the energy industry to deny the dangers of climate change though they had sponsored the very studies — one of which I worked on 40 years ago– that predicted it with considerable accuracy. They spent many $millions over these forty years convincing people that global warming was nothing to worry about. All of this suffering, all of this anguish, and this existential threat to all life on our beautiful Planet Earth is because some greedy guys in suits were only concerned about their bottom line.
When you think about it, there seems to be something about our species that just doesn’t get the “system interdependence” thing…not the most promising species survival characteristic.
lummi island wine tasting mar 17 ’23
Winter Hours: 4-6 pm Fridays only
Friday Bread Pickup This Week
Pear Buckwheat – Begins with an overnight poolish preferment mixed the next day with bread flour and fresh milled buckwheat; the preferment allows the dough to begin to develop before the addition of toasted walnuts and dried pears soaked in white wine. – $5/loaf
French Country Bread – A a rustic country loaf made with bread flour, fresh milled whole wheat, and and a bit of toasted wheat germ. After building the levain with a sourdough culture 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. – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Chocolate Babka Rolls – A sweet pastry dough full of eggs, butter and sugar, rolled and spread with a chocolate filling, rolled up and cut into individual rolls that are placed in baking forms for baking and then brushed with sugar syrup after baking. – 2/$5
To get on the bread order list, click on 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.
This Week’s $10 Wine Tasting:
Charles Krug Napa Valley Sauvignon Blanc ’20 Napa $15
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.
Bodega Garzon Tannat Reserve ’18 Uruguay $15
Opaque deep, dark red; opens with enticing, delicious aromas of very ripe, dark fruit and berries stewed in their own liqueur, with lingering notes of spice, herb, and licorice on the seamless finish.
Pomum Red ’16 Washington $18
Carefully made Bordeaux blend of cab, cab franc, malbec, petite verdot, and merlot; aromas of red fruit-leather and exotic spices; flavors of black cherry, cranberry, and garrigue.
Economics of the Heart: Lies, Damned lies, and ‘Regular and Routine’
photo courtesy beardoholic.com
The classic phrase was made famous by Mark Twain, though for which he credited Disraeli; but the actual coining of the phrase is lost in the mists and myths of history. Mr. Twain’s version was ‘There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.‘ (link). This story is told at some point in just about every statistics class everywhere for its suggestion that one can “massage” any statistical analysis to make it “prove” anything you want. Nowadays Fox News hosts don’t even bother with analysis, they just make it up as they go along. But politics aside, statistical analysis provides extremely useful information about groups of observations of any sort.
On our island front burner for some weeks now has been the recent ferry fare increase proposal unveiled at the January County Council Meeting by Public Works, and which is being rushed into law as quickly as possible with limited opportunity for input or reflective discussion. A central bone of contention between County officials and Island residents is that a primary reason for the fare increase is that Public Works has charged 55% of the $800,000 cost of a major infrastructure repair to ferry fare receipts as “regular and routine maintenance.” This practice is blatantly contrary to several elements of State and County law.
A few of us have been challenging this illegal assignment of $.8 million to the fare burden on the grounds that said repairs should properly be considered capital expenses because they add value and years of service to the structures in question. Indeed, the County has an annual contract with the State Dept of Transportation which specifically excludes such expenses from being classified as “ordinary maintenance.”
Many public and private entities have rules of thumb such as dollar limits to easily decide whether to account for a specific expense as capital improvement (adds value and service life) or as operations/maintenance expenses. The limit may vary depending on the size of the firm or agency, but around $10k is a common boundary. Under this standard definition, the $400k being charged to the fare box as “ordinary maintenance” is way, way, way out of line with convention.
Whatcom County has specific rules for ferry accounting laid out in County Code Chapter 10.34 In particular, 10.34.005B states:
B. “Operating cost” means all actual daily running expenses and all actual regular and routine maintenance and administrative expenses associated with the use and operation of all physical elements of the ferry system”
Curiously, this definition makes no mention of capital costs. Rather the central focus of the statute is on the intent of the words “regular and routine” to qualify an expense as a valid “operating cost.” So let’s take a look at common synonyms and antonyms of these words to get a bead on the main intention of this carefully chosen wording.
- synonyms of REGULAR: customary, periodic, recurrent
- synonyms of ROUTINE: everyday, normal, familiar
The feeling here is of calm waters, constancy, and predictability.
In contrast, here are the common antonyms/opposites of each word:
- antonyms of REGULAR: infrequent, occasional, unexpected
- antonyms of ROUTINE: exceptional, extraordinary, uncommon
The feeling here is of choppy waters, tension, and stress.
The takeaway is that great care was taken in the wording of the statute to ensure stability and predictability. Think about it: You want to be able to set fares that will likely stay the same for some years at a time. You want both the expenses and the revenue to be predictable and consistent from year to year. The goal of this wording is to ensure system stability, with fares covering the day to day expenses of the system, and for out of the ordinary expenses to be absorbed the same way as road washouts, bridge failures, and fires: from general taxation.
Let’s be clear: the statute as currently written limits the annual fare burden to paying “regular and routine” administrative and operating costs to maintain the same transportation options here as everywhere else in the County. If the new Public Works Director is successful in changing the rules to allow charging the fare box for major capital upgrades — a clear violation of both State and County laws– rising fares will continue to push frequent commuters to the mainland to be replaced by retirees and telecommuters. Not a pretty picture, and not a sustainable model because it forces its best customers to move away. So there’s a lot at stake for our community.
Along those lines, for those of you who have not seen Janice’s very thorough posting to the County Council on these challenges, it is highly recommended reading for all Islanders, and you can read it here.
2072 Granger Way