lummi island wine tasting ides of March ’24

Spring Hours

 

 

    ahh, more signs of spring…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 This week’s wine tasting

Bodega Garzon Albarino ’21        Uruguay        $15
Pale yellow with greenish reflections, this Albariño is intense in the nose, with peach and citrus notes. The freshness and minerality mid-palate is superb, with remarkable acidity and a round, crisp finish. A lovely wine at a bargain price!

Angeline Cab Sauv  ’21    California       $16
Fruit-forward, easy-to-drink style with aromas of lush cherry, cassis, and plum and rich cherry and plum flavors with hints of vanilla and soft oak that linger on the palate and finish with complexity and length that over-delivers for the modest price.

Marchetti Villa Bonomi Conero Riserva    ’19      Italy       $27
100% Sangiovese from Montepulciano, aged 16 mos. in barriques and 12 mos. in bottle; shows intense floral bouquet, intense, nuanced      flavors; ripe, pleasing tannins, and satisfying finish.

 

 

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 that is fermented overnight before the final dough is mixed with bread flour and freshly milled whole wheat as well as rolled oats. Some honey for sweetness, a little milk for a tender crumb and loaded with raisins and a healthy dose of cinnamon. This is not a rich sweet bread with a swirl of cinnamon sugar, instead the cinnamon is mixed into the dough and flavors the entire bread. It is a hearty rustic loaf. Great for breakfast toast, even better for french toast – $5/loaf

and pastry this week…

Individual Cinnamon Rolls – Made with a rich sweet roll dough full of eggs, butter and sugar. The dough is rolled out, spread with pastry cream and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. Then rolled up and sliced into individual rolls for baking. And boy are they delicious!! – 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.

 

Economics of the Heart:  The Ominous Resurgence of Vapid Pragmatism

“Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump – Caricatures” by DonkeyHotey is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Let’s face it, the world is going to Hell around us. And the forces pushing it there have been morphing since the Sixties, from Nixon to Reagan, Bushes I and II, and the Tweetster. You will recall that all of them, under the auspices of economic freedom, found ways to withhold federal money for the poor, the sick, the disturbed. The needy of all stripes were systemically thrown off the bus, out of the lifeboat, or onto the streets to fend for themselves. “No sir, no more aid for “welfare queens,” those single moms with five kids, ripping us off for another pack of cigarettes as they tried to house and feed a family. Seriously, that was a thing in Gov. Reagan’s California in the late 60’s.

Indeed, the sixties began an ever-evolving system of reactionary “backlashes” against interlopers who might cross unmarked class boundaries, including a range of heterosexual, homosexual, ethnic, gender, or self-sufficiency credentials. And let’s include the many ways White Republicans responded to the Obama Presidency.

Fast forward to today, and we see the Tweetster slipping out of the many sets of cuffs he so richly deserves because he is self-entitled to Special Privileges, like grabbing women by private parts, stripping rights from everyone who is not a white, Christian, America-born male, and bending every rule, every principle, every guideline of integrity to acquire one more penny, bit of influence, advantage, or perk, even from (perhaps “especially from”) those who have been disadvantaged by the same rules that have advantaged them.

We see this across the Red States and across the world in countless local hierarchies of “star-bellied sneetches” vs. “plain-bellied sneetches.” It’s the way we are or what we become if we don’t have an effective magnet in our moral compasses.

This all comes up tonight after attending yet another unproductive ferry committee meeting with County Public Works, which conducts the financial levers of costs vs. fare revenues in a consistently opaque way. So tonight’s insight is that, “ah, we finally get it that when you serve Whatever Company, public, private, or government, your loyalty is increasingly to the Company and its parochial interests, not to some broader principle of service or equity or fairness or justice to, you know, the collective welfare.

It is always a disturbing disappointment to encounter these petty or self-serving loyalties, evasive rationales, or deliberate prevarications in a dialogue aimed at achieving a common purpose. So we need constantly to distinguish in any particular moment when we are acting from principle and when we are acting from expediency.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wine Tasting

lummi island wine tasting mar 7 ’24

Spring Hours!

 

 

ahquiet enough for conversation…

 

 

 

 

 

 This week’s wine tasting

Marchetti Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi Classico ’22         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.

Cote 125 Corbieres Rouge  ’19    France    $15
Classic Corbieres blend of carignan, grenache, syrah, cinsault; rich and concentrated with blueberry and strawberry aromas and flavors, with notes of spices and black pepper, good balance, and a long, smooth finish.

Chakana Estate Selection Malbec ’20       Argentina     $20
Opaque, bright purple in color; pleasing nose of plums and spicy attic dust; full bodied palate of plums and spice with good length, balanced acidity, soft tannins, and lingering finish.

 

 

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 pastry this week…

Pain aux Raisin – Made with the same laminated dough as croissants; the dough is rolled out, spread with pastry cream and sprinkled with a mix of golden raisins and dried cranberries soaked in sugar syrup,and 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.

 

Economics of the Heart: Authoritarian Followers

Trump-26 by TaylorHerring

We all either already knew or have been learning about authoritarian leaders, and we pretty much get it: they are only okay when they are in complete charge of everyone else. But why anyone would believe, follow, support, or agree with these people is a total mystery to many of us. So who are these people who line up for Tweetster rallies, send him money, threaten anyone who doesn’t back him, get all their “facts” from Fox News and talk radio, and apparently sin as much as anyone else but don’t let themselves enjoy it or admit it to anyone.

It turns out that the personality of the authoritarian leader is quite different from that of the followers. While the authoritarian leader is driven by a sense of “I’m only okay when I have absolute control,” social psychologist Bob Altermeyer studied the followers of such people for many years and found they share several traits and beliefs:

So for the followers there seems to be a lot here about “I’m only okay when someone very strong is in complete control,” but to a lot of us that sounds like something “devoutly to be eschewed,” as one old sailor once said about being in a hurricane in a sailboat.

The dynamic between the authoritarian leader and his (usually) followers is that he gives them both license and approval for physical aggression against those who are perceived as inferior and nonconforming in various ways. They share an unspoken ethos that the most nonconforming deserve the worst punishments, the most powerful deserve the most deference, and apparently, that delivering punishment to those the leader pegs as “enemies” is irresistible. (picture the mob-mind at the Capitol on Jan 6…) 

Curiously, these followers also share a narrow conventionalism about how people should behave, even in their private lives. In that sense, many are religious fundamentalists, with limited abilities to discern or perhaps even imagine shades of gray. In this sense they seem deeply imprisoned by the absolutism of their beliefs.

We close tonight with a few interesting related research findings for the US:

— Authoritarian voters have generally preferred Republican leaders;

— Tweetster supporters are substantially more likely than other Republicans to score highly on authoritarian aggression and group-based dominance; and

–Authoritarianism is different from Conservatism because authoritarianism reflects aversion to differences across space (i.e. diversity of people and beliefs at a given moment) while conservatism reflects aversion to changes over time.

We all see and feel these deep divisions in our country about very basic values of what is true or not true, good or bad, desirable or undesirable, fair or unfair, right or wrong, and find it puzzling that there could be such broad disagreement about such fundamental perceptions. 

On reflection it seems extremely unlikely that these nation-threatening divisions just happened by themselves. It seems more likely that a lot of deliberate effort has gone into fostering and promulgating them across our country for many years toward our downfall and their ascension. Creepy stuff…!

(We started this piece by looking at this item in Wikipedia, and found it so interesting it’s as far as we got…)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wine Tasting

lummi island wine tasting mar 1 ’24

Spring Hours: now open both Friday and Saturday afternoons!

Beginning this weekend we begin our new Spring hours,

OPEN

      Fridays 4-6 pm for wine tasting and bread order pickup;

      Saturdays 3-5 pm for wine tasting…and sales…and the usual frivolity and chatter…!

 

 

 

 This week’s wine tasting

Celler Can Blau Can Blau Montsant Red

Celler Can Blau Can Blau Montsant Red

Ponzi Pinot Gris ’21    Oregon     $16
Aromas of honeydew melon, candied citrus peel, white peach and honeysuckle; balanced palate
of sweet tangerine peel, meringue, lime, apricot and light white pepper.

Can Blau Can Blau ’20     Spain     $16
Aromas and flavors of cocoa bean and ripe, dark fruits and berries, a seamless texture, and long, silky finish that improves with aeration.

Chakana Estate Selection Malbec ’20       Argentina     $20
Opaque, bright purple in color; pleasing nose of plums and spicy attic dust; full bodied palate of plums and spice with good length, balanced acidity, soft tannins, and lingering finish.

 

 

Friday Bread Pickup This Week

Multi Grain English Muffin Loaf – Originally intended for English muffins that instead became a loaf, with nice mix of bread flour, spelt, whole wheat and oatmeal for a lot of flavor. Add buttermilk and butter and get a nice light, tender crumb. Delicious for toast or sandwiches! – $5/loaf

French Country Bread – A levain bread from a sourdough culture of bread flour, fresh milled whole wheat, and a bit of toasted wheat germ. The final dough gets a long cool overnight ferment to develop into a rustic country loaf! – $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, cut into individual rolls, and placed in baking forms, and brushed with sugar syrup after baking. Some people say they hide them to to be sure to get one…!.- 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.

 

Economics of the Heart: Following the Bread Crumbs

A few weeks ago we started musing about how our nation and its Constitution seem to be arriving at the brink of being overthrown by a bizarre, extremely well-funded, and decades-long constellation of very wealthy, focused, and patient conspirators whose plans have been festering and evolving for decades. Below are a few reads to ponder, and see if you can find any links among the bread crumbs.

John Birch Society ...“Birchers helped forge an alternative political tradition on the far right and that the core ideas were an anti-establishment, apocalyptic, more violent mode of politics, conspiracy theories, anti-interventionism and more explicit racism and…were some of the first people on the right to take up questions of public morality, of Christian evangelical politics…”

Heritage Foundation  (see also) ...reporter asks :At CPAC last year, Victor Orban said Hungary is “the place where we didn’t just talk about defeating the progressives and liberals and causing a conservative Christian political turn, but we actually did it.” …HF President’s reply: “It’s all true. It should be celebrated.”

Project for a New American Century “To win the “War on Terror,” the signatories outlined several key steps: capturing and eliminating Osama Bin Laden, overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s regime, targeting Hezbollah, defending Israel and forcing the Palestinian Authority to eradicate terrorism and finally, to substantially reinforce the United States defense budget.”

********     *******   *******

Just a moment…just a moment...uh-huh….uh-huhWHAT?? ARE YOU SERIOUS????...the Supreme Court did WHAT??!!

Um, sorry folks, but we are terminating this broadcast early because recent events have demonstrated that there is now no need to make a case that the enemies of democracy have been working on scuttling ours for several decades, because today’s news demonstrates two things very clearly:

1. Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision to stop all pending federal court cases against the Tweetster for the foreseeable future (presumably till after the next election and ITS years of litigation while the nation and the world succumb to Global Fascism and Global Warming); and

2. Sadly, since the Republican coup we were intending to warn about and fight against is now un fait accompli, and our worst fears sont devenus réalité, we must unite and VOTE if we are to have any hope of restoring the Constitutional Democracy we grew up in.

We have eight months to save our nation and our planet. No time to waste…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wine Tasting

lummi island wine tasting feb 23 ’24

Friday, Feb 16

OPEN for wine tasting and bread order pickup Friday from 4-6pm

 

 

NOTE:Beginning in March we will also be open Saturdays from 3-5pm!

 

  

 

 

 This week’s wine tasting

Domaine Chibaou Surnaturel Merlot ’22     France     $25
Complex nose of black fruits, candied strawberries and caramel; round, rich and concentrated, balanced, with good length in the mouth. No sulfites.

Domaine Chibaou Sauvignon Blanc ’22       France     $19
no notes available

Garzon Tannat Reserva   ’21        Uruguay       $35
Deep purple color, fresh spicy aromas of plums and raspberries, full-bodied palate with ripe tannins and minerality make for a terroir-driven wine of unique identity.

 

Friday Bread Pickup This Week

Multi Grain Levain – Made with a sourdough culture and using a flavorful mix of bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat and rye. A nice mixture of flax, sesame, sunflower and pumpkin seeds and some oatmeal add great flavor and crunch. And just a little honey for some sweetness. – $5/loaf

Polenta Levain – Also made with a levain, known as sourdough, in which the sourdough starter is fed and built up over several days, then mixed with bread flour and polenta in the final dough mix. This bread is a nice rustic loaf with great corn flavor. – $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 topped with a black sesame streusel before baking. Ooh la la, what’s not to like? – 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.

 

Economics of the Heart: Alexey Navalny

“Alexey Navalny чб 2” by Митя Алешковский is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5.

For the past week I have been grieving for this man at some semi-conscious level. I never understood why he chose to go back to Russia after Putin had already tried to kill him once. Nor could I understand his perennial good spirits in prison. But since his apparent execution in Russia, it has been hard to think about him without feeling tears in my eyes. It is heartbreaking, and I don’t know exactly why.

He must have known it would eventually happen before he chose to go back, but he went anyway; and in most photos during his incarceration he seemed in good spirits. On a mission, perhaps, to make his people recognize their oppression and stand up to it themselves…?

I came to feel that he was in his way leading something important, something he believed in deeply about how people should be allowed to live. He confronted the megalithic power and penchant for cruelty of Putin’s post-Soviet Russia with a rare inner strength,  commitment, and an endearing kind of innocence and commitment, all honorable pursuits.

It is hard to say why I feel such grief about his deeply symbolic, sacrificial journey…some combination perhaps of futility, horror, sympathy, outrage at the brutality, and hanging out here for so many days on the edge of tears I don’t understand.

And I wonder…is this touching everyone this deeply…?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wine Tasting