Comments Off on lummi island wine tasting jan12 ’24

lummi island wine tasting jan12 ’24

HOURS  for  January, 2024 

Current plans are for bread pickup to every other week until further notice.

Friday, Jan 12, 4-6pm: Open for wine tasting, sales, and bread pickup; SPECIAL NOTE: DUE TO VERY COLD WEATHER, BREAD PICKUP  FROM 4-5 pm ONLY

Friday, Jan 19, 4-6pm: Open for wine tasting & sales only (no bread)

Friday, Jan 26, 4-6pm: Open for wine tasting, sales, and bread order pickup

 

 

 

This week’s wine tasting: hearty wines to keep you warm durin’ the Nor’eastuh

Chardonnay - Phantom WinePhantom Chardonnay ’21  California  $16
Entices with 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. (especially soothing at room temperature! )

Jordanov Vranec ’20    Macedonia   $12
Aromas of ripe berries with notes of clove, nutmeg and cardamom. In the mouth it is full bodied with ripe dark fruit and hints of herbs with a noticeable dark chocolate edge on the well-structured finish. Enjoy with cheese, beef, lamb dishes or grilled sausage.

MAN Vintners Pinotage ’20   South Africa    $12
Aromas of dark coffee beans, red berries, nutmeg, and vanilla spice turning to dark berries and smoky plum; rustic yet silky and juicy, with smooth tannins, balanced acidity, and comforting intensity.

Taylor Fladgate 10 yr Tawny Port  Portugal    $28
Deep brick color with amber rim; rich, elegant nose of ripe berries with a delicate nuttiness and subtle notes of chocolate, butterscotch and fine oak; smooth and silky on the palate with persisting ripe, figgy, jammy flavors on the long finish.

 

Friday Bread Pickup This Week: 4-5pm only due to freezing weather!

Pain Meunier -aka “Miller’s Bread”— made with pre-fermented dough it contains all portions of the wheat berry: flour, fresh milled whole wheat, cracked wheat and wheat germ, always a favorite and a great all around bread. It makes the best toast! – $5/loaf

Sonnenblumenbrot – aka Sunflower Seed Bread–  made with a pre-ferment that is a complete dough itself. It takes a portion of the flour, water, salt and yeast that ferments overnight before mixing the final dough, made with bread flour and freshly milled rye, then loaded up with toasted sunflower seeds and some barley malt syrup for sweetness. This is a typical German seed bread – $5/loaf

Fruit & Spice Rolls – Not as rich and sweet as many of our pastry choices, with almost half whole wheat but still have plenty of butter, and sugar add flavor and a tender crumb, along with dried cranberries, golden raisins, and fresh orange peel/juice with anise, cinnamon, mace, and cardamon and topped with demerara sugar before baking for that extra bit of sweetness and crunch. 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.

 

Lummi Island Wild Canned Pink Salmon

As all of our locals know, one of the many blessings of living here is the annual late summer reefnet fishery in Legoe Bay. Though for many years it has been a mere shadow of the incredible harvests of the past as migrating salmon (silver, chinook, coho, sockeye, chum, pink) swam by on their way to spawn in upper reaches of the Nooksack and Fraser Rivers.

Nowadays the entire life cycle of anadromous fish (that return from the ocean to spawn in the fresh water rivers and streams where they were hatched) is under duress from climate change as well as from many decades of systematic over-fishing, pollution, and dams. 

Given all of that, the Lummi Island reefnet fishery is a special gem, using ancient techniques and modern gear to catch a small number of migrating fish each fall in a way that preserves their quality and the ability of the stock to spawn and reproduce.

No doubt many of you have taken advantage of this year’s local catch at the Beach Store Cafe and/or the Reef Net trailer parked regularly by the Islander store. For several month now they have been serving fish and chips using reef-net caught salmon, particularly pinks . It is soooo good! 

And now it is available in cans right here at the wine shop, right next to our stock of LI Wild canned albacore tuna, both almost certainly the best you have ever had!

video1        video 2

The Economics of the Heart: Encore– Our Ongoing Civil War

Cincinnati - Spring Grove Cemetery & Arboretum 'Sentinel at Sunset – Civil War Section'

Cincinnati – Spring Grove Cemetery & Arboretum ‘Sentinel at Sunset – Civil War Section’

While looking through back posts for this week’s bread notes, I ran across a piece from a year and a half ago (July 22, ’22) that seems even more relevant and disturbing in today’s Maga Hatter’s Tea Party than it was then. Or as some people say, “things are getting worse faster than we’re getting older…!”

*        *       *

Every once in a while we read something that unexpectedly pulls several seemingly unrelated issues into such a compelling systemic context that we have something of a “Eureka!” moment. That happened this week while reading an interview from last March with Barbara Walter, a political scientist at  UCSD, who recently published a fascinating and timely book: How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.

Over the decades political scientists have collected lots of data about revolutions and tested lots of models in search of a set of variables that could best predict them. In 1994 the CIA started a think tank called the Political Instability Task Force to identify effective metrics to assess a society’s likelihood of civil war. Over time the group has examined some 250 historical instances of acute instability between 1955 and 2002, assessed some thirty different factors as possible predictors, and found only two that had significant predictive value.

The first factor is a nation’s degree of anocracy, its tendency to be autocratic or democratic. Scores ranged from -10 for a completely autocratic state like North Korea to +10 for a completely democratic state like Denmark or Canada. Most countries are somewhere in between. The US is currently at a +5, down from the +10 it had enjoyed since the scale was invented. Countries in the ambiguous zone between -5 and +5 have significant and conflicting elements of both and are therefore considered at higher risk for revolution than either stable democracies or stable autocracies.

The second factor is whether the current dominant organizing principle in the society is based on ideology (values) or identity (religion, ethnicity, race). While ideological differences lend themselves well to democratic compromise, identity differences are much more likely to lead to animosity, tribalism, and even civil war.

In the interview Professor Walter relates a story of how her father, a young German boy during the Nazi years, before emigrating to the US in the 50’s, became very agitated about the Trump candidacy and election in 2016, seeing in his politics many parallels to the Nazi brown-shirts of his childhood: twisting facts, denigrating minorities and immigrants, and undermining dissent.

There have always been political differences in American politics, but compromises have led to deals, public business has been conducted, and the government has been stable. The eye-opening takeaway from the author’s observations is that the political battle that has been going on in our country since about 1992 has never been just a simple clash of liberal and conservative values. It began in the 90’s with Gingrich’s open warfare against the Clinton White House in particular and Congressional Democrats in general. It started becoming less and less about ideas and values and more and more about identity.

That was accelerated by populist response to the Obama Presidency, which in turn led to the election of some 87 “Tea Party” Republicans in 2010 who espoused the extreme views of the Koch brothers and its lobbying arm ALEC. Most of them came from such heavily gerrymandered conservative districts they were largely guaranteed election, unless they lost a primary to a candidate further to their Right. With no incentive to move toward the center for reelection, they have have increasingly refused to compromise on any issue rather than give Democrats a “win” on anything– quite willing to let their constituents suffer rather than compromise.

It is difficult to see anything positive coming from the increased militancy of the Right, spotlighted spectacularly by the recent authoritarian Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and to forbid the EPA from regulating carbon emissions. Our nation seems to be nearing a turning point: The party’s long-term viability may be in doubt if a strategy of mindless, implacable obstruction endangers the stability and prosperity of the country, causing too many voters to consider it an existential threat. Cynical political realism, if nothing else, suggests that the Republican Party can’t carry on forever as a permanent revolution. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/12/04/tea-party-trumpism-conservatives-populism/)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wine Tasting
Comments Off on lummi island wine tasting– a few changes for 2024

lummi island wine tasting– a few changes for 2024

Some Changes for  January, 2024 

We are closed for a few end of year accounting tasks, and planning to reopen on January 12 for wine tasting and bread pickup, with a few likely changes from the routine of  the Covid years.

Bread: The current plan is to change the weekly bread pickup from every week to every other week. Those of you who are already signed up for the mailing list will likely receive details from our baker sometime this weekend…our next bread pickup will be Friday, Jan 12.

Wine Tasting:  We will have some help with wine tasting for the next few months from volunteer Jonathan, Anne G’s son-in-law, who will be on the island for the next several months and thinks it might be a good way to get to know some Island neighbors.(he’s right, it IS!). 

This even raises the possibility of being open both Friday nights and Saturday afternoons as we move toward Spring, and which we have not done since Covid began four years ago…it has been a Long Haul! Phew!

See you soon!

 

Next Friday Bread Pickup Jan 12  (see above)

 

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.

 

 

 

Happy New Year 2024!!

Solstice sunset over Orcas Island

 

This view of the Solstice sunset from our place is looking SW over the hump of Orcas island, and that was a week ago, for the longest night of the year here.

Already the days are getting longer, albeit by only a few seconds a day, gradually becoming minutes a day by March.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wine Tasting
Comments Off on lummi island wine tasting winter solstice ’21

lummi island wine tasting winter solstice ’21

Winter Hours: Open Friday  4-6pm  

Happy Holidays!

We will be open this Friday, Dec 22 for wine tasting and sales, then closed for the holidays and reopening January 12.

We are anticipating a change in bread orders from every week to every two weeks. Stay tuned for details!

 

 

Friday Bread Pickup This Week…

Sweet Corn & Dried Cranberry – Made with polenta and bread flour, then enriched with milk, butter and honey for a soft and tender crumb, then loaded up with dried cranberries. Has great corn flavor but is not a traditional quick cornbread. A delicious bread that makes great toast — $5/loaf

Italian Breakfast Bread – A delicious sweet, but not too sweet, bread. Made with bread flour eggs, yogurt, a little sugar and vanilla as well as dried cranberries golden raisins and candied lemon peel. Perfect for breakfast as toast or even better for french toast on Christmas morning – $5/loaf

and pastry this week…

Cranberry Muffins – Inspired by a well known coffee shop’s cranberry bliss bars these muffins are made with all the traditional muffin ingredients: flour, sugar, eggs, buttermilk and butter. A generous helping of fresh cranberries, toasted pecans and topped with a brown sugar streusel finish them off. Yum! – 4/$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.

 

This week’s wine tasting

Argyle Brut Blanc de Blanc    Oregon    WA90pts    $29
Not only does this little Oregon winery make great pinot noir, it also has earned a reputation for producing terrific Old World style sparkling wine. This blend of chardonnay and pinot noir displays a bouquet of brioche, pear, apple, and white peach. Crisp, balanced, and lengthy, it’s an outstanding value.

Garzon Petit Clos Marselan ’19       Uruguay       
Intense red color with carmine reflections; elegant nose of red and black fruits with finish of eucalyptus and mint; Palate of integrated tannins, mineral and subtly saline notes that reflect its exceptional terroir.

Taylor Fladgate 10 yr Tawny Port
Deep brick color with amber rim; rich, elegant nose of ripe berries with a delicate nuttiness and subtle notes of chocolate, butterscotch and fine oak; smooth and silky on the palate with persisting ripe, figgy, jammy flavors on the long finish.

 

  Economics of the Heart: Politics and Karma

Life is like a giant Ouija board. Every living being constantly has a hand on it. The game goes on and on and on, as every hand exerts its little pressure in some direction, and each moment carries the collective impacts of the individual forces to the next moment.

We are each constantly engaged in the business of staying alive, and that requires cyclical sequence of four kinds of activities: 1) recognizing our needs, 2) taking action to satisfy them, 3) savoring whatever nourishment results, and 4) enjoying a moment of satisfaction and rest. Every activity has varying degrees of success or failure;  and most of us are better at some elements than others.

A typical day in our lives is a constant repetition of these activities, from getting up in the morning, eating, working, playing, resting, sleeping. Every activity by every player in every moment has a role in creating the initial conditions for the next moment. Karma is the process by which our own actions and our collective actions in this moment determine initial conditions for the next moment— some 80,000 times a second according to some ancient texts.

While everyone plays some tiny role in the collective karma of the entire system, most of us impact only a relatively small number of others. Only leaders at various levels are in positions where their everyday decisions can have significant and lasting impacts on many people’s lives. Ideally such leaders take care that their decisions result in the greatest benefits to all who are impacted by them.

However, this has decidedly not been the case with egocentric dictators. The twentieth century saw two devastating world wars started by such men, at the cost of vast destruction and millions of deaths. Those impacts set the stage for a never-ending series of indirect “proxy wars” across the world in which “great powers” fought for dominance in less-developed countries rather than confront each other directly, including American combat adventures in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and now Ukraine and Gaza.  

All of this was bad enough under leaders who at least knew the game had limits: insurgency, counter-insurgency, small gains and losses, lots of political posturing, all involving years of death and destruction against local and innocent populations. The best thing we can say about it is that it was carried out with a general unwritten agreement that it was a substitute for direct confrontation in which everyone could lose more than they could possibly gain. At the same time, it killed or maimed tens of thousands of people around the world. And at the end of the day it is hard to see how anyone anywhere benefited from any of it.

At this moment in time our nation is a year away from a major election, and despite his indictments for several major crimes, the Tweetster is still the favored Presidential candidate for what remains of the Republican Party. This man is the most publicity-driven person most of us have ever seen in our lives. He craves it, needs it, is addicted to seeing himself in the news, constantly creating controversy and chaos to dominate media headlines. He lives for it. Every day, as he travels among his many indictments, he tells the world his dream of being America’s first dictator, tearing up the Constitution, jailing his enemies, and looting our economy.

The point of our Ouija board analogy is that the karma of global civilization is affected by every living entity in every moment. But only a handful of individuals are in such positions of power that they can, by their actions, destroy the ability of our planet to support any life at all. Whether by intention or oversight or stupidity, at present only one seems completely capable of all three. He is an existential menace and under no circumstances can he (or any disciple) ever be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office again.  

Btw, a very relevant perspective for dealing with this deeply disturbing set of circumstances is explored in , by Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder (formerly Judt’s student). It is Snyder’s assembly of a long series of conversations between the two as Judt was dying from ALS a decade ago.

Judt’s reminiscences make connections between political and contemporary discourse, explaining in detail the profound impact of two world wars and the Great Depression on subsequent politics, philosophy, communism, fascism, and the role of social democracy and Keynesian economics in bringing liberal government, broad-based growth, and social equality to the post-war world…all stuff we will need to survive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wine Tasting
Comments Off on lummi island wine tasting dec 15 ’23

lummi island wine tasting dec 15 ’23

Winter Hours: Open Fridays  4-6pm  

Happy Holidays!

We will be open both Fridays before Christmas for wine tasting and sales, 12/15 and 12/22.

January reopening will probably 1/12, depending on some possible changes in the bread delivery schedule.

 

 

 

Friday Bread Pickup This Week…

Black Pepper Walnut- made with a nice mix of flours, bread flour, fresh milled whole wheat and rye. A fair amount of black pepper and toasted walnuts give this bread great flavor with just a bit of peppery bite to it. Works well with all sorts of meats and cheese- $5/loaf

Four Seed Buttermilk – Includes all the elements of whole wheat, adding cracked wheat and bran in to the bread flour instead of milling whole wheat berries. It also has buttermilk and oil for a tender bread and a little tang, and finished with a bit of honey and sunflower, pumpkin, and sesame seeds and toasted millet   $5/loaf

and pastry this week…

Morning Buns – Made popular by Tartine Bakery in San Francisco…mine are made with the same laminated dough as croissants. The dough is rolled out, spread with a filling of brown sugar, orange zest, butter and cinnamon, rolled up and sliced before baking. 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.

 

This week’s wine tasting

Marchetti Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi Classico ’21         Italy       $14
Verdicchio/ Malvasia blend using only free-run juice; pale straw color with green overtones; intense bouquet of citrus, lemon zest, and floral notes,with complex fruity character, and crisp, well-balanced palate.

Sanguineti Morellino de Scansano ’21     Italy         $14
Soil of river stones, quartz, sea shells; flavors of sun-ripened, slightly smoky fruit, fresh cracked pepper, sage, and ocean brine; taut structure and a long, slightly smoky finish.

Lancyre Pic St Loup Vielles Vignes ’17    France   $16
100 % malbec; unfolds with dark, enchanting notes of blackberry, grilled plum, and jammy raspberry with accents of orange peel, vanilla, and tobacco spice, finishing with balanced structure, plush texture, and a lengthy finish.

Lovo Fior d’Arancio Sparkling Moscato ’18           Italy          $15
A very rare clone of Moscato with an unmistakable citrus scent from nearby orange groves for a sparkling wine with refined bubbles and beautiful, pearlescent color, a perfect accompaniment to dessert, or maybe dessert all by itself!

 

Wine of the Week: Marchetti Verdicchio di Castelli di Jesi Classico ’21         Italy       $14

The Marche wine region reaches east from the mountainous spine of Italy to the Adriatic. This week’s low-yield Verdicchio is a hallmark of the varietal, with refreshing citrus fruits, playful acidity, and complex minerality. Made only with juice from a gentle half-press, it is precise and engaging.

Established in 1968 as a DOC of 18 hilly communes, the Verdicchio Classico, or Castelli di Jesi, region, is located some 35 kilometers inland from Ancona, an unusual wine region near the Adriatic coast where red grapes are grown close to the sea, and white grapes prefer to be slightly inland. The distinction of being “Classico” is a recognition that “this is what wine from this grape is meant to taste like!”

Wine history of the region dates back to the Romans and before, with some clay artifacts such as amphorae dating the region’s wine production back to the Iron Age. These days, the verdicchios from the region have developed a consistent quality and tasting profile that sets them apart.

 

 

 

 

  Economics of the Heart: Getting on Track Against Climate Change

The world has known for many decades about the linkage between fossil fuels and global warming. Numerous studies contracted by the oil industry as early as the mid-seventies pioneered effective methodologies for assessing the financial, social, environmental, and economic impacts of these projected changes.

Over the years the broad impacts predicted by those early models have proved surprisingly accurate in modeling how increased greenhouse gases would affect patterns of atmospheric and oceanic circulation, evaporation, rainfall, winds, flooding, ocean currents, ice cap responses, all of it. I had a part in one of those studies in 1980 looking at the possible impacts of global warming on world fisheries. 

While I was skeptical that the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry was likely to allow meaningful or timely response to this very serious environmental threat, I never dreamed the industry would not only delay action for four decades, but also go to considerable expense to downplay any threat of global warming, (and probably supplying Reagan with his quip that it had more to do with livestock farts than fossil fuels.) The whole world would not be in the mess it is today if energy industry executives had chosen to help rather than delay and obfuscate– as, we presume, they had been taught to do in business school.

Well, hopefully the decisions of this latest COP 28 will prove better late than never. The resultant unanimous agreement at this meeting seems due to the work of the the High-Level Expert Group on the Net-Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Entities, a special committee formed by the Secretary-General of the UN specifically to increase the likelihood of success.  The goal of the group was, in preparation for the recent COP23 meeting, to develop stronger and clearer standards for net-zero emissions pledges by non-State entities – including businesses, investors, cities, and regions – and speed up their implementation. The Group generated ten how-to recommendations for credible, accountable net-zero pledges for what non-State actors need to follow to achieve net-zero ambitions, a how-to guide for credible, accountable net-zero pledges.

Since it was launched last spring, the Group pursued its work amidst a persistent pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, global inflation, energy security concerns, and
increasingly destructive climate change‐fueled extreme weather around the world. Climate-related disasters have been most acutely felt in the world’s least developed countries, exacerbating the debt crisis they already face and underlining how the developed economies exported the environmental costs of their years of inaction onto the poorest societies.

This is apparent when we see that the Top Five global emitters (China, US, India, EU, and Russia) accounted for about 60 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in 2021, and the Group of 20 (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union) are responsible for about 76 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Read more on UN and climate action: 

Net-Zero Coalition

Transforming climate issues into action

 “Integrity Matters: Net Zero commitments by Businesses, Financial Institutions, Cities and Regions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wine Tasting