Comments Off on lummi island wine tasting nov 12 ’21

lummi island wine tasting nov 12 ’21

Current Covid Protocols

This weekend is the Autumn Island Artists Studio Tour, which as you can imagine has been greatly diminished since Covid began. Although we are not officially on the Tour, we continue to show recent paintings by our neighbor Anne Gibert, and invite you to come by and spend some time with them.

On Saturday we will be joined by new Island resident, sommelier, and wine rep Steven Brown, who will pour samples of four interesting wines (see below) he thinks should work well with your Thanksgiving dinner plans.

The tastings will be both on Friday and Saturday from 4-6 pm, subject to our familiar Covid requests:

— You must have completed a full Covid vaccination sequence to participate;

— We ask all to maintain mindful social distance from people outside your regular “neighborhood pods.”

 

Friday Bread This Week

Each Sunday bread offerings for the coming Friday are emailed to the mailing list by Island Bakery. Orders returned by the 5 pm Tuesday deadline are baked and available for pickup each Friday at the wine shop from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. To get on the bread order mailing list, click on the Contact Us link at the top of the page and fill out the form.

Over the years the bakery has established a rotating list of several dozen breads and pastries from which two different artisan breads and a pastry are selected each week.

This week’s deliveries:

Multi Grain – Made with pre-fermented dough where a portion of the flour, water, salt & yeast is mixed and fermented overnight before mixing the final dough. This allows a portion of the dough to begin the enzymatic activity and gluten development overnight in a cool environment. The next day it is mixed with bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat, rye, plus polenta cornmeal, flax, sunflower and sesame seeds for a nice bit of crunch and some extra flavor. – $5/loaf

Rosemary Olive Oil – made with bread flour and freshly milled white whole wheat for flavor and texture. Fresh rosemary from the garden and olive oil make for a tender crumb and a nice crisp crust. – $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 a delicious creamy filling made fresh with even more butter, sugar and eggs and almond flour. Yum!   2/$5

 

Wine of the Week:  Mas Estate Blanquette de Limoux Mauzac Methode Traditionale         France      $18

Cote Mas Cremant de Limoux BrutBack in August we featured the Antech Blanquette de Limoux Methode Traditionale: this week we offer another version of the traditional method, which we particularly enjoy when we reach for bubbly. The reason is that it is made from different grapes and a different process than most sparkling wine, including champagne.

Blanquette de Limoux is made from Mauzac, the original varietal used for making sparkling wines in France a few centuries back, plus chardonnay and chenin blanc, using practices developed in Limoux long before sparkling wine was ever made in the Champagne region.

In the Ancestral Method, the grapes are harvested by hand when almost overripe. Fermentation takes place at low temperature, until the juice reaches a modest alcohol content of 5%. The Ancestral Method then uses a second fermentation lasting several weeks, using only the residual sugars from the first fermentation, until the wine  reaches 6 or 7% alcohol. By comparison, the most common varietals in French bubbly are chardonnay, petit meunier, and pinot noir, and are generally over 12% alcohol.

This Blanquette offers an interesting and tasty example of this original style of French sparkling wine. The method and the use of the original grape mauzac yield a taste that symbolizes the terroir, traditions and history of Limoux. Its straw yellow color,  twirling bubbles, and sparkling reflections are irresistible, and the palate is lively with notes of juicy apple and grape.

 

The Economics of the Heart: Civilization in the Balance

LucretiusOver the past week or so Pat has been reading The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt. She is finding it one of those rare, very well-written, evocative books that pulls bits and pieces of many ideas together into such a compelling view of the nature of humanity that your mind starts tying it to all kinds of your own experiences. At its most basic level, the author explores how the rediscovery of an ancient manuscript written some 1500 years earlier precipitated the Renaissance and propelled Western Civilization out of the Dark Ages.

It also explores more indirectly the nature of what exactly had “died” to trigger the Dark Ages and was reborn in the Renaissance, and by implication, how it might die again.

The author explores at some length the history of the Great Library of Alexandria that, according to legend, began under the reign of Ptolemy II around 295 BC, where it gathered the greatest scholars of the world to study and exchange ideas over several hundred years. Legend has it that at some point it was burned to the ground along with its vast storehouse of the accumulated knowledge of the Western world at the time. But it remains a mystery where it was located, when it burned, or what caused the fire.

The destruction has been variously ascribed to an ignorant mob of Christian zealots, or to the Caliph Omar as late as 640 CE when, unmoved by this vast collection of learning, supposedly stated ‘they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.’  The interesting takeaway here is that something in the way classical Mediterranean civilizations waxed and waned between 300 BCE and 500 CE makes the library at Alexandria a metaphor for human intellectual and artistic development: the feudalism of the Middle Ages is marked by its lack of scientific curiosity, the sterility of its art, the poverty of its aspiration.

Right now across our own country we  are living through a similar time marked by disdain for science, the rise of “alternative facts,” and willful destruction of the traditional humanistic cultural values embedded in our Constitution. The Capitol is our Library, and it is still on fire.

 

This week’s $5 tasting:

Mas Estate Blanquette de Limoux Mauzac  Methode Traditionale   France     $18
Light and easy to drink, with vibrant notes of fresh peach, honeysuckle, baked apple and sweet, ripe pear, all balanced by ample acidity, brisk perlage, and a lingering toasty richness on the finish. Pairs well with aperitifs, a main meal, or after dinner relaxation.

Tyrsos Vermentino Sardegna   ’19     Italy         $11
Fresh, exquisite, delicate palate, dominated by notes of citrus fruits, accents of apricot, pineapple and peach, with lingering light grassy nuances.  more

Coeur De Terre Pinot Noir  ’18       Oregon      $26
Offers deep red color and earthy aromatics of dried herbs, followed by notes of cherry and raspberry with soft palate of fine tannins and round, balanced mouth feel.

Rasa Occam’s Razor Red Columbia Valley  ’18        Washington     $22
Bouquet of blackberry and cassis, with nuances of spice, leather, vanilla, and espresso. Full-bodied palate shows suave tannins with rich notes of dark berries, cassis, black cherry, and vanilla with hints of cigar, chocolate, cedar, and spice.

Wine Tasting
Comments Off on lummi island wine tasting nov 5 ’21

lummi island wine tasting nov 5 ’21

Current Covid Protocols

Last week we were stranded off-island with our trailer down at Bayview State Park, planning to come back to open last Friday. However, the ferry broke down, and since we couldn’t come home, we stayed another night, uncertain when the ferry would return.

As luck would have it, we got to the ferry line a little after 2 pm, expecting a long line of cars. But as luck would have it, we arrived just as the first run of our trusty Whatcom Chief pulled in, and we were home by 2:30. We did open the wine shop, but had only two visitors.

Therefore, we will pour the same wine list as was scheduled for last week.

This week we will again offer indoor tastings on Friday and  Saturday from 4-6 pm, with our familiar Covid requests:

— You must have completed a full Covid vaccination sequence to participate;

— We ask all to maintain mindful social distance from people outside your regular “neighborhood pods.”

 

Friday Bread

Each Sunday bread offerings for the coming Friday are emailed to the mailing list by Island Bakery. Orders returned by the 5 pm Tuesday deadline are baked and available for pickup each Friday at the wine shop from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. To get on the bread order mailing list, click on the Contact Us link at the top of the page and fill out the form.

Over the years the bakery has established a rotating list of several dozen breads and pastries from which two different artisan breads and a pastry are selected each week.

This week’s deliveries:

Toasted Pecan & Flax Seed – This levain bread is different than most of the levain breads that I do as it is made with a starter that is fed with rye flour instead of wheat flour which creates a different flavor profile. The final dough is made with bread flour as well as fresh milled whole wheat. Toasted pecans, flax seeds and honey all add up for a very flavorful bread – $5/loaf.

Heidebrot – Translated as “bread of the heath,” after a region in central Germany known for fields of red heather. This is a farmhouse bread from an aromatic, lighter sourdough made with whole grain rye. a rye-fed sourdough starter, fresh milled whole grain rye flour, and regular bread flour as well – $5/loaf

and pastry this week…

Morning Buns – 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, and rolled up and sliced before baking. – 2/$5

 

Wine of the Week:  Longship Lady Wolf Malbec ’18      Washington    $25

Longship is a fairly new family-owned winery in Richland, in the heart of Washington wine country. Established in 2013, it has focused on producing  big, hand-crafted, barrel-aged, red varietals like tempranillo, malbec, syrah, cabernet sauvignon, with at least 60% proportion aged for 18 months in new oak barrels.

The name “Longship,” and the adoption of the Viking Longship as the winery’s logo is a nod to the family’s Scandinavian heritage and the winery’s ongoing journey to produce some of the finest wines in the Pacific Northwest.

The Richland tasting room was added at the end of 2016, not just to feature their  wines, but also, as is the case here at the Wine Gallery, to create a social space where friends can gather to relax in a convivial environment while sharing delicious handcrafted wine.

We took an immediate liking to the wine when we tasted it a couple of weeks ago. Chances are you will, too!

 

 

The Economics of the Heart: Reconsidering Nuclear Power

For the past several years we have been making relatively frequent trailer trips to Corvallis. That’s because Pat’s son Donald (himself a new papa) was attending OSU studying fermentation science. On those trips we have regularly stayed at the Benton County campground/ fairgrounds about five minutes away from their place. For a couple of years the park hosts were a couple in which he attended to the park, and she was involved in an interesting project at OSU with a company called NuScale. The goal of the project was nothing less than to develop the next generation of nuclear reactors, designed specifically to be SMR’s: small modular reactors, that could replace fossil fuel powered electric generation over the next few decades.

Just today, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Romanian Minister of Energy Virgil Popescu announced a new commercial partnership between NuScale Power and Nuclearelectrica that was signed earlier this week while meeting at the UN Conference on Climate Change (COP26) in Glasgow. The company’s SMR design is just completing a long process of becoming the first ever to be approved by the NRC. The deal with Romania is one of many international projects under development. 

As the video above shows, on the production side, the new technology being developed by NuScale and its partners is more efficient and less expensive in both dollars and environmental risks than either earlier generations of nuclear reactors or current fossil fuel technology. At the same time it is abundantly clear that we are many decades away from any possibility to provide all our energy from non-polluting renewables. Deploying the next generation of nuclear power generation shows great potential for greatly reducing the former risks of nuclear power production and combating climate change by replacing the coal-fired power plants that are the primary consumers of fossil fuels.

That leaves us with one other caveat about nuclear energy. One way to describe it is to relate a conversation I had a couple of decades ago with a gentleman about the age I am now (today I turned 76!) , when we were sitting on his lovely boat a few slips away from my own old, barely afloat, and yet beautiful in her way sloop Windsong. I was admiring the finish on his exterior wood trim, and he told me it was a certain teak oil. After some discussion of all the high-tech finishes that were even then available, he said, “Now when someone is trying to sell me some high-tech finish, the first question I ask is, “Yup, sounds good…but How Do You Get it Off?” The Nuclear corollary is “Sounds good, but Whattaya do with the Waste?”

As it turns out, Finland has come up with a pretty good answer (sorry about the 15 sec of ads) to the very demanding nuclear waste disposal problem. As shown in the video, Finland has been constructing the world’s first Deep Geologic Waste Repository for spent nuclear fuel. The waste is packed into individual boron steel canisters which are then enclosed in individual corrosion-resistant copper canisters, inserted into individual holes in the billion-year-old bedrock, backfilled with bentonite clay, and sealed to lie inert for a Very, Very Long Time.

The evidence is overwhelming that our continued use of fossil fuels is 1) destroying the ability of our planet to support life, and 2) getting worse every minute. Back in the fifties or sixties, these things were the stuff of far-out science fiction fantasies. But in 2021 this is our Reality; our Darwinian Karma unfolding before our very eyes under the hands of all our fellow humans.

 

This week’s $5 tasting:

Planeta Segreta Il Bianco     Sicily      $14
Clear yellow with greenish hints; engaging aromas of citrus and flowers and hints of peach, papaya and chamomile. Balanced and refined, with a lingering and refreshing finish.

FontanaFredda Briccotondo Piemonte Barbera ’18      Italy   $15
Nose of blackberries and plums, with hints of black pepper and cinnamon. Crisp and fresh on the palate with  sweet, soft tannins,  silky texture, and great fruit character.

Longship Lady Wolf Malbec ’18      Washington    $25
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.

 

Wine Tasting
Comments Off on lummi island wine tasting october 29 ’21

lummi island wine tasting october 29 ’21

****  NOTE:  As we go to press tonight we are camped in the trailer at Bayview State Park. We have learned that the ferry is out of service for repairs, so we have decided to stay another night here and will NOT be opening the wine shop on Friday, Oct 29. Hopefully the ferry will return to service and we can be home to open on Saturday.

 

Current Covid Protocols

Last Saturday offered a pleasant taste of the quiet, off-season, pubby days of close neighbors and familiar faces. Very low-key and nourishing!

This week we will again offer indoor tastings on Saturday from 4-6 pm, with our familiar Covid requests:

— You must have completed a full Covid vaccination sequence to participate;

— We ask all to maintain mindful social distance from people outside your regular “neighborhood pods.”

 

Friday Bread

Each Sunday bread offerings for the coming Friday are emailed to the mailing list by Island Bakery. Orders returned by the 5 pm Tuesday deadline are baked and available for pickup each Friday at the wine shop from 4:00 – 5:30 pm.

Over the years the bakery has established a rotating list of several dozen breads and pastries from which two different artisan breads and a pastry are selected each week.

To get on the bread order mailing list, just click on the Contact Us link at the top of the page and fill out the form.

This week’s deliveries:

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…

Pumpkin Muffins- Made with pumpkin and all the familiar pumpkin pie spices. Topped with a streusel made with butter, brown sugar and pumpkin seeds not to mention then filled with a cream cheese filling. Yum! Caution: may be addictive! – 4/$5.

 

Wine of the Week:  Longship Lady Wolf Malbec ’18      Washington    $25

Longship is a fairly new family-owned winery in Richland, in the heart of Washington wine country. Established in 2013, it has focused on producing  big, hand-crafted, barrel-aged, red varietals like tempranillo, malbec, syrah, cabernet sauvignon, with at least 60% proportion aged for 18 months in new oak barrels.

The name “Longship,” and the adoption of the Viking Longship as the winery’s logo is a nod to the family’s Scandinavian heritage and the winery’s ongoing journey to produce some of the finest wines in the Pacific Northwest.

The Richland tasting room was added at the end of 2016, not just to feature their  wines, but also, as is the case here at the Wine Gallery, to create a social space where friends can gather to relax in a convivial environment while sharing delicious handcrafted wine.

We took an immediate liking to the wine when we tasted it a couple of weeks ago. Chances are you will, too!

 

The Economics of the Heart: Oil is the New Tobacco

I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream: Stories: Ellison, Harlan ...“Climate scientists are now as certain that the burning of fossil fuels causes global warming as public health experts are sure that smoking tobacco causes cancer.” —

The House Committee on Oversight has recently begun questioning energy company executives about the disinformation they have been spreading for decades to minimize the threats of climate change from the burning of the fossil fuels they produce and we all have used.

In 1980 I was involved in a project at Battelle Labs exploring the potential economic impacts of anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change. Though this was very early in the game exploring climate change, there were already several sophisticated climate models sounding the alarm. My portion of the study looked at the likely impacts on marine fisheries, and identified many areas of concern we have been observing right here in our own marine environment and habitat.

Broadly speaking, though the atmosphere is one gigantic element of an intricately interdependent global system, even the pioneering models in the seventies were sophisticated enough to include the interactive thermodynamic relationships among the distributions of global atmospheric temperatures, wind patterns, evaporation, rainfall, ocean temperatures, circulation patterns, and salinity, as well as an intricate array of positive and negative feedback loops that could slow down or accelerate global warming.

The  article also highlights obvious parallels between the multi-decades battle between government and Big Tobacco and the current battle to fully expose and end Big Energy’s multi-decade PR campaign to discredit climate change as a global existential threat.  Tobacco kept regulation at bay for decades, and Big Energy has presented an even more impenetrable barrier to reducing carbon emissions.

As the beginning quote above suggests, most humans on the planet have seen and experienced the effects of climate change in their own geographical settings. Broad swaths of the planet are drying up, burning, flooding, and starving. Millions of species are in danger of extinction. Billions of human beings will be increasingly competing for dwindling water supplies, arable land, and livable climates.

And right here in our own country many politicians of both parties still seem to believe that ignoring climate change is somehow “better for the economy.”

Old-time science fiction writer Harlan Ellison captured our growing sense of frustration and doom when he titled one of his classic stories, ” I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream!”

 

This week’s $5 tasting:

Planeta Segreta Il Bianco     Sicily      $14
Clear yellow with greenish hints; engaging aromas of citrus and flowers and hints of peach, papaya and chamomile. Balanced and refined, with a lingering and refreshing finish.

FontanaFredda Briccotondo Piemonte Barbera ’18      Italy   $15
Nose of blackberries and plums, with hints of black pepper and cinnamon. Crisp and fresh on the palate with  sweet, soft tannins,  silky texture, and great fruit character.

Longship Lady Wolf Malbec ’18      Washington    $25
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.

 

Wine Tasting
Comments Off on lummi island wine tasting oct 22 ’21

lummi island wine tasting oct 22 ’21

Current Covid Protocols

Looks like a rainy/windy weekend ahead. This past Friday we had a small group of regulars hang out a bit after bread pickup…enough for a sense of community without triggering Covid anxiety. Nice!

Last Saturday was a taste of the quiet off-season pubby days of close neighbors and familiar faces. Very low-key.

This week we will again offer indoor tastings on both Friday and Saturday from 4-6 pm, with our familiar Covid requests:

— You must have completed a full Covid vaccination sequence to participate;

— We ask all to maintain mindful social distance from people outside your regular “neighborhood pods.”

 

Friday Bread

Each Sunday bread offerings for the coming Friday are emailed to the mailing list by Island Bakery. Orders returned by the 5 pm Tuesday deadline are baked and available for pickup each Friday at the wine shop from 4:00 – 5:30 pm.

Over the years the bakery has established a rotating list of several dozen breads and pastries from which two different artisan breads and a pastry are selected each week.

If you would like to be on the bread order mailing list, click on the Contact Us link at the top of the page and fill out the form.

This week’s deliveries:

Pan de Cioccolate – This delicious chocolate artisan bread is NOT a dessert pastry. Rather it is a rich chocolate bread made with a levain, bread flour, and fresh milled rye flour, honey for sweetness, vanilla and plenty of dark chocolate. Makes GREAT toast and even better French toast! – $5/loaf.

Levain w/ Dried Cherries and Pecans – Made from an overnight levain sourdough starter. This allows the fermentation process to start and the gluten to start developing. The final dough is made with the levain, bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat and then loaded up with dried cherries and toasted pecans. A nice rustic loaf that goes well with meats and cheese – $5/loaf

and pastry this week…

Black Sesame & Candied Lemon Brioche: A delicious brioche dough full of eggs, butter and sugar. Filled with fresh lemon zest and candied lemon and as if that wasn’t enough, topped with a black sesame streusel before baking…Good, they be!! – 2/$5

 

Wine of the Week:

This week we return to an old favorite wine from a favorite Washington winemaker, Javier Alfonso of Pomum Cellars in Woodinville.  The Pomum label now has its own estate vineyard, Konnowac Vineyard located at 1100 ft elevation in the northwest corner of the Rattlesnake Hills AVA in the Yakima Valley, which provides fruit for most of the French varietals.

In addition, because Javier grew up in the Ribero del Duero region of Spain, he also makes a number of Spanish wines under the Idilico label, and he often refers to tempranillo as simply tinto, as if it was understood that “red wine” is just another way of saying  tempranillo. All his wines therefore display his preference for highly drinkable wines with rich, evolving, and lingering flavors, silky tannic depth and length, and a Muse that beckons “hey, Amigo, un vaso mas!”

This weekend we are pouring his Idilico garnacha, a lovely and engaging wine that definitely displays its winemaker’s fingerprints.

 

The Economics of the Heart: The Rising Costs of Ego

In the last few days the news cycle has presented us with a with several subtle harbingers of Our Future with regard to climate change and the very real threat of economic extinction of human civilization and millions of living species.

“We assess that climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to US national security interests as the physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions mount.”

  1. Our National Intelligence agencies have just released a report outlining how  the accelerating impacts of climate change will be increasing a broad array of security threats to the United States, and by implication, to civilization itself as many countries face desertification,  devastating wildfires, and economic collapse. We are already seeing the beginnings of mass migrations from failing economies from North Africa to Europe, from Afghanistan to neighboring countries, and to the US from Central America. These will get worse at an increasing rate determined by how quickly and how much, if at all, we humans are able to cut our carbon footprints on our World.

“The Freedom to Vote Act is therefore able to counteract some of these state Republican measures in a way that the For the People Act, introduced back in January, does not.”  -The Nation

2. Waking up yesterday morning I had this image: 74 million Democrats and their US Senators are all on board a gigantic plane that has been flying around DC for months preparing to land. That’s because shortly after takeoff, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema took over the cockpit and locked the door. Early on we thought they wanted some concessions, and that if we gave them they would land the plane safely, and we would all go about our lives in a better world for what they had done.

After the first month we were still anxious to please them and also anxious about not pleasing them. After the second month, when the menu was down to soggy crackers and recycled urine-water, we started getting grumpy. Now, after four months, and we are all pooping in the aisles and kids are whimpering, we gag on their political sadism and take their threats seriously. Now we see that that they will crash our plane into the Beating Heart of Mother Earth if we don’t let them strangle Mother Earth more slowly over the next couple of decades.

All of which is to say, probably easier just to write them bigger checks for their votes than Big Coal can offer Manchin or Big Pharma can offer Sinema. Seems like the best choice all around, let’s do it!

“There is no middle ground between the arsonist and the firefighter. ”  – Democracy Docket

3. Yesterday’s “demonstration vote” on the simple matter of bringing the new Freedom To Vote Act to the Senate floor for mere discussion, while not surprising, is still deeply disturbing. Majority Leader Schumer brought the bill to the Senate floor partially as a demonstration to Sen. Manchin, who months ago had promised to bring at least 11 Republican votes in favor of such a bill. Instead, not even one Republican Senator would even vote to allow discussion of the bill. Schumer voted against his own bill so that it could be brought back to the floor at a later date.

A brief review of #2 above highlights Mr. Manchin’s central role in this week’s musing. In truth it is turning out that a technical majority of one or two votes in the House or the Senate is a Stalemate, and it is an  astonishing political achievement that the new administration has brought it as far as they have.

Don’t know about you, but another article we read this week by Charles Blow in the NYT convinced us that as desirable as many of the goals of proposed legislation are for promoting the general welfare of our entire national family and its long term future, we have come to believe that at this moment in our history, our first priority must be to do whatever is necessary to establish and preserve the right of all citizens to vote and have their votes count equally. Even if we don’t get all we want, it will take longer for Republicans to take it all away. Again.

We are engaged in two wars, on different fronts but against the same enemy, our own human nature. All of our history is based on internecine warfare over everything more than one of us desires. Right now our entire planet lies on the chopping block. Like Joe Manchin it is ambivalent about human survival; to Gaia it’s just another play, another curtain, a brief intermission.

 

This week’s $5 tasting:

Folie a Deux Pinot Gris ’18    Sonoma      $14
Guava, pineapple and lemon-lime flavors make for a fleshy, brightly layered expression of the varietal, both soft on the palate and crisp on the palate.

Los Arraez Lagares     Spain       $
60/40  Monastrell- Cab blend from Valencia; deep and dark aromas of juicy, ripe dark plums leading to palate that dances around flavors of plum and prune with notes of coffee and chocolate.

Idilico Garnacha ’14       Washington    $18
Moderately saturated, showing flavors of cherry, strawberry, game and licorice, with flint and rock notes on the inviting nose. Graceful, pliant and sweet with a lingering, firm, ripely tannic finish.

 

 

 

Wine Tasting