Artisan Wine Gallery

Lummi Island Wine Tasting

lummi island wine tasting april 25-26 ’25

Wine Tasting  April 25-26  ’25 

Now on Summer Schedule: Fridays & Saturdays  4-6 pm!

 

 

Lummi Island refection from Bayview State Park

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Friday Bread Pickup This Week

Multi Grain made with pre-fermented dough – Using this preferment a portion of the flour, water, salt & yeast is mixed and fermented overnight before mixing the final dough. The next day it is mixed with bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat and rye, then some cornmeal, flax, sunflower and sesame seeds are added for a nice bit of crunch and some extra flavor.  –$5/loaf

Rosemary Olive Oil – Also made with pre-fermented dough like the Multi Grain and then mixed with bread flour and freshly milled white whole wheat for additional flavor and texture. Fresh rosemary from the garden and olive oil to make for a nice tender crumb and a nice crisp crust. A great all around bread – $5/loaf

…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 as if that wasn’t enough, topped with a chocolate glaze before baking. Ooh la la, what’s not to like. I can only make a limited number so be sure to get your order in early. – 2/$5.

 

This week’s $10  Wine Tasting

Vielle Ferme Blanc  ’23       France      $12
Flavorful blend of bourboulenc, grenache blanc, roussanne, ugni blanc, & vermentino delivering seductive aromas of jasmine, hawthorn, and pear with flavors of blood orange with delicate saline notes.

Marietta Old Vine Red    ’22     California   $16
Zinfandel-based red blend from Geyserville with lovely bright plum fruit, dark focused notes of briar and black tea, sweet spice, medium body, and velvety tannins to pair with almost any meal or occasion.

Decoy Red ’21            California              $18
60% Cab, 40% Merlot, Zinfandel, Syrah, and Cab; aromas of blackberry, plum, spice and savory herbs; fresh, rich, and savory on the palate with rich, silky tannins and a long, lush finish.

 

(Traveling, no essay this week…)

 

 

 

lummi island wine tasting april 18-19 ’25

Wine Tasting  April 18-19  ’25  Now on Summer Schedule: Fridays & Saturdays  4-6 pm!   spring turning toward summer…!           Friday Bread Pickup This Week Italian Breakfast Bread – A sweetly delicious bread! Made with bread flour, eggs, yogurt, a little sugar and vanilla, with dried cranberries, golden raisins, and candied lemon peel. Perfect for breakfast toast or how about some Easter morning French Toast!?  – $5/loaf Colomba di Pasqua  (aka ‘Easter Dove’): A traditional Italian Easter cake made with a sweet Italian levain (lievito madre),with a sweet, cake-like dough of eggs, sugar and butter, fresh and candied orange peel, a crunchy almond/hazelnut glaze and pearl sugar before baking in a dove-shaped baking form!   – $10/loaf Hot Cross Buns – Uses an enriched dough with plenty of butter, sugar and eggs, with lots of of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger, balancing  plenty of currants, and candied lemon, and orange peel, and topped with a flavorful paste.   2/$5   This week’s $10  Wine Tasting Robert Hall Sauv Blanc   ’22      Refreshingly dry and light-bodied with aromas of green apple, citrus, and lemongrass, with bright,crisp, lively acidity. 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 and velvety tannins…a consistent local favorite! Hess Paso Robles Cabernet Sauvignon ’21          California             $26 Intense aromas of bright red cherry and raspberry, followed by notes of cedar and black pepper accompanied by layers of juicy, full raspberry notes, smooth tannins, and lingering finish of chocolate and roasted espresso.”   Economics of the Heart: Fighting Back The “Velocity of Money“ (click sound on, 1st 90 secs only) is a measure of the rate at which exchange takes place in an economy. It estimates the number of times that a unit of currency moves from one entity to another within a given period of time. Simply put, it’s the rate at which buyers and sellers in an economy collectively exchange value. Every purchase is also a sale. Our own favorite metaphor for this is a global table we all sit around with a little pile of “money” in front of us. When someone buys something from us we receive “money/credit” from one side, and when we buy something we pass some of that money to our left. The flow is global and incessant. In an economic boom, $$ passing through the economy too quickly can cause inflation, and $$ passing through too slowly can cause a contraction. It is the job of the Federal Reserve system to balance this ‘velocity of money’ to maintain about a 2% annual growth rate. During the recent Covid-caused recession, coordination between the Biden administration and the Fed got our economy through the global pandemic exceptionally well, comparatively speaking, despite the idiotic policies of the Tweetster’s last (we thought) year in office. Any normal person taking office after Biden would have recognized they were getting a booming post-Covid economy running on all cylinders, and their main focus should have been to leave ittf alone! But Project 2025 is not interested in keeping the economy running. Its primary goals are to loot the US economy for their own personal gain; replace our Constitutional government with a fascist dictatorship with no individual rights, in which anyone can be arrested, tortured, and disappeared at the whim of any local “boss.” Project 2025 is not interested in our economy, the global economy, or the well-being of Americans or the global environment. It appears that their single purpose is to align with Putin’s Russia and hurt as many people as they can, as much as they can, as soon as they can, for as long as they can. One practical recipe for avoiding this dystopian future was recently outlined by Russian Chess Champion Gary Kasporov in this recent article in the Atlantic. While Kasporov discusses many reasons for anxiety, concern, and immediate engagement based on his experiences in Putin’s Russia, the article closes with a very practical and essential First Step to hobble Project 2025: “Four votes in the Senate. Three votes in the House. That’s all it takes. Find the weakest links. Go after them, democratically. Fundraise for them if they stand up, or against them if they don’t. The two-party system in America right now is Traitors versus Losers. Playing to win means asking every red-state legislator if they are fine with being in the Traitor Caucus.” Sounds like a Plan!              

lummi island wine tasting april 11-12 ’25

Wine Tasting Friday & Saturday April 11-12  ’25  4-6 pm 

     SPRING SCHEDULE BEGINS…!

  The current plan is to be open Fridays AND Saturdays from 4-6 ! 

 

cherry blossom time…!

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Friday Bread Pickup This Week

Pain au Levain – Made with a nice mix of bread flour and freshly milled whole wheat and rye flours. After building the sourdough and mixing the final dough it gets a long cool overnight ferment in the refrigerator. This really allows the flavor to develop in this bread. A great all around bread – $5/loaf

Cinnamon Raisin – Made with a poolish of bread and fresh milled rye flour fermented overnight before mixing with bread flour, freshly milled whole wheat,  rolled oats. Some honey for sweetness, a little milk for a tender crumb and loaded with raisins and a healthy dose of cinnamon for a hearty rustic loaf. – $5/loaf 

and pastry this week…

Cinnamon Rolls! – These are made with a rich sweet roll dough full of eggs, butter and sugar. The dough is rolled out, spread with pastry cream, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, rolled up and sliced into rolls for baking. – 2/$5

Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday the Bakery emails the week’s bread offering to the mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday (and not already claimed!) will be available for pickup at the wine shop each Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm.  Contact us at least two weeks before your visit to get on the bread list!

 

This week’s $10  Wine Tasting

Garzon Single Vineyard Albarino ’20        Uruguay    $34 Elegant pale yellow in color; fresh and vibrant nose of tropical fruit with a chorus of subtle citrus and floral notes leads to a round, fresh, lingering palate with a saline minerality and a marked sense of terroir.

Can Blau Can Blau ’20     Spain     $16 From the lovely Montsant wine region an hour SW of Barcelona, this long-time favorite calms the soul with aromas and flavors of cocoa bean, ripe dark fruits and berries, a seamless texture, and long, silky finish that improves with aeration.

Jacob Williams Sadie Red Blend  NV     Washington   $28 Named for beloved longtime winery dog Sadie, this is a special blend of Cabernet Sauv, Merlot, Syrah and Cab Franc. Medium body, broad selection of red fruits, cedar, cassis , and savory herbs; multi-faceted  and easy to enjoy for its primary fruit, herbal complexity, chocolaty tannins, and clean finish.

 

Celler Can Blau

(This piece was first posted in 2017 after a great wine trip in Spain…)

We have been buying and enjoying wines from Celler Can Blau for many years now, as they set a high standard for great wines at very reasonable prices. So, when we visited Spain a few years ago, tracking down the Can Blau winery for a visit was something of a priority. And since we were spending a week in the Montsant wine region where the grapes are grown, we expended some effort in tracking it down. As it turned out, it wasn’t that easy, and we stumbled upon it quite by accident while visiting a wine Cooperativa not far from our lodging in Capcanes called Mas Roig. (“mahss roych”)

It turned out that the Can Blau Main Offices are located elsewhere in Spain, but in order to market the wines as from the Denominacion of Montsant, it is not enough that the grapes are grown in Montsant– no, no, no, Senor-– the wine must also be made in Montsant! And guess what, the Can Blau wines were made in the very winery we were visiting, i.e., Mas Roig, which we discovered when the winemaker (Nuria Sarroca), imminently with child as I recall, breezed past us to check something in her part of the winery. Btw, we have found consistently over many years that this wine continues to improve for several days after opening…!

 

Economics of the Heart:

Only a few months ago the United States economy was the envy of the world. Despite the multi-year  global recession from Covid 19 lockdowns and the mid-2020 stock market crash across the developed world, Joe Biden’s decades of experience in government and commitment to the American people kept our economy growing and improving. It will be remembered by history as a remarkable achievement.

Over the last two months, the Outlaw administration installed by Project 2025 has put idiots in charge of key government agencies, fired tens of thousands of highly experienced federal workers for no reason but malice, broken our 75-yr alliances with allies and neighbors, abandoned increasingly effective policies to curb global warming, and imposed huge tariffs on goods imported from every country in the world, raising their prices here by at least as much as those new tariffs.

At every level, from household to community to city, county, state, nation, region, and globe, every economy behaves more like a giant flock of starlings than like any machine. At any moment the wind can change, a predator can appear, or this or that part of the bird-cloud can suddenly swerve in an entirely different direction. 

The global economy is like a giant table where every person on Earth brings a stock of skills, assets, and constant needs for food, clothing, shelter, and community. Everyone is constantly engaged in a repetitive cycle of working, buying, selling, and “living,” doing their best to get by every day in a community setting that is safe, supportive, and engaging.

These market relationships have an ancient history of community markets where trading has traditionally taken place. Some markets are still bartered, but most have used  currency or credit cards as a means of exchange for millennia. As social animals every human individual, household, or community constantly interacts as a producer, buyer, and seller. All of these interactions are part of a global market driven by individual self-interest and budget constraints. 

All of this has been going on for a very long time. However, as we have mentioned recently, CEO’s of large companies have long been engaged with maintaining market value of their company stock by building a reputation for quality, reliability, and service. In recent decades however, CEO’s of major firms have shifted their focus to maximizing not their company reputation, but their stock’s market price, at the expense of product and service quality. As in the Boeing case, or the growing history of hostile corporate takeovers, today’s business leaders are experiencetaking over any valuable enterprise and mining it for every penny before shutting it down and moving on to the next.

Except in this case, it is Our Country that is being taken over, looted, pumped dry, and impoverished at every level.

Which leads us to the present moment in United States history where the federal government has been taken over not by warfare, but by a “hostile takeover”  by a coalition of billionaires intent on looting it of everything of value for their own personal wealth. These guys are already the richest .1% in the world…what can they possibly gain from removing the United States from its post-WWII central position of global leadership and cooperative alliances?

It seems a virtual certainty that our national secrets have been sold to or otherwise compromised by our internal national enemies to our external national enemies, opening the door for players like Hamas, Iran, the Saudis, the Taliban, and more to soon have nuclear capabilities and willing suicide bombers. 

To close on a more positive note, it does appear at this particular moment that the Tweetster’s increasingly lunatic Idiocies of the Tariffs, the Allies, Doge, and the crashing Stock Market may perhaps be attracting enough billionaire attention to make some difference. At the same time, since last Saturday’s nationwide rallies, we have seen many communities across the nation mobilizing long-term determination to save our democracy. 

 

 

 

 

 

lummi island wine tasting April 4 ’25

 

Wine Tasting Friday April 4  ’25  4-6 pm

      spring quince always a welcome sign…!

 

Friday Bread Pickup This Week

Honey, Wheat, Lemon & Poppy seeds – Made with a poolish that ferments some of the flour, yeast and water 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. – $5/loaf.

Rye w/ Currants, Pumpkin Seeds & Cracked Coriander – Made with a starter fed with rye instead of wheat flour, the final dough includes bread flour and freshly milled rye flour, some molasses for sweetness and pumpkin seeds, currants and cracked coriander seed make for an interesting flavor profile – $5/loaf

and SORRY, PASTRY this week is reserved for participants in the annual Island Road cleanup beginning at the Grange  Saturday , April 5th for annual Island road cleanup!

Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday the Bakery emails the week’s bread offering to the mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday (and not already claimed!) will be available for pickup at the wine shop each Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm.  Contact us at least two weeks before your visit to get on the bread list!

This week’s $10  Wine Tasting

Laurenz V Kremstal Sophie Singing Gruner Veltliner    $15           Austria
Sustainably produced; youthful nose of orange blossoms, straw, and apples; spritzy on the medium-bodied palate, with notes of yellow grapefruit and a refreshing crisp acidity for a sunny afternoon.

Idilico Tempranillo ’21         Washington          $19
Made in Washington in the Rioja style, with aromas of leather, forest floor and balsamic notes wrapped around a core of red fruit, notes of fresh dried herbs, sweet spice and red currant; medium bodied with juicy mouthfeel, soft tannin, and a lingering finish.

 

Alain de la Treille Chinon Cab Franc  ’22       France       $21
From Loire valley’s alluvial gravel & yellow limestone terraces along the Vienne, offering complex minerality and juicy,  spicy flavors that dance from plum to cassis, game, earth, and tobacco, all with a delicacy that speaks of the village’s cool conditions.”

 

 

 

 

Economics of the Heart: Not Even Billionaire Hungry Ghosts Can Ever Feel Nourished

Followers of this blog will be familiar with our numerous rants about the economic incompetence of Republicans in general and Maga in particular. After nearly 100 years of practical evidence that, yes, in fact, the economy is a circular flow of exchange in which everyone digs, builds, grows, finds, fishes, or otherwise creates a product or service that contributes value. That value manifests through exchange in markets, contracts, purchases, and rentals. Most people have roles as both producers and consumers, borrowers and lenders.

Exchange only happens when seller and buyer feel a sense of mutual satisfaction from an exchange. The buyer shops for the lowest price and the seller holds out for the highest price. Metaphorically, picture a huge table where everyone alive has a seat and a stock of skills and assets which are passed to them from their right and they pass on as they choose to their left to maximize their own well-being. Some need to keep a big pot in front of them, and some prefer very little or even nothing.

And like any game, all of this operates under a set of rules. As economist Joan Robinson aptly put it, “Every economic system requires a set a values, a set of rules, and a will in the people to carry them out.” Well nowadays, some at the top want it all, and don’t feel like passing it around anymore. And that threatens the whole system.

The ugly truth is that for as long as there have been human beings some proportion (males in particular) can never get enough (wealth, power, adoration ) to feel secure or comfortable. Like the robber barons of the early 20th century, they are driven to accumulate more and more, like Disney’s Scrooge in his money bin. Theirs is not so much a political movement as a psychological disorder, and the people who have it have been pissed off at “liberals” since the 1929 stock collapse that they caused brought a global economic Depression.

Since the end of WWII there has been a continual political tension between those whose definition of “enough” in a Maslovion sense is modest, and those who are quite incapable of experiencing “enoughness,” either of love, or esteem, or deference.

Picture a mom with her little son looking up at her and asking, “Mommy, it is true Republicans have hearts of stone?” And she is saying, “No dear, it’s not…Republicans don’t have hearts…”(yeah, that’s my mom and me above in 1952..!.)

Seriously, how else can you explain the constant need of a handful of billionaires to own ever more wealth, more even than many entire nations; who are still pissed off about even a modestly graduated income tax, and who are now willfully destroying our country and the global economy to get even more wealth? In Buddhist terms they qualify as Hungry Ghosts, creatures with ravenous appetites but cursed with no ability to take in nourishment no matter how much they swallow.

In a world of scarcity, hunger, and misery for hundreds of millions of people, there is no morally acceptable rationale for not following the old adage “from each according to ability; to each according to need.”

Which brings us to this moment in human history where a small group of ego-centric white men are claiming Divine Right, in the name of their Authoritarian Jesus, as the chosen ones to tear down our 250-year old democracy, abandon our Constitution, crash the global economy, and doom human civilization and our entire planet to the climate-driven extinction of life itself– all for a few more shekels in their money bins that will not make them happy. Does Elon Musk look like a happy man with his ketamine?

The Reality of this moment, right now, in early April of the year we humans call 2025, is that a small bunch of angry, bullying men of cruelty (beaten into them by damaged fathers…?) are actively engaged in destroying our democracy, crashing the global economy, and inflicting enormous suffering on our entire planet.

It has to stop, and we all must all work together to make it happen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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