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lummi island wine tasting mar 2-3 ’24

Spring Hours

• Fridays 4-6 pm
  
• Saturdays 3-5 pm
  

 

 

    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

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

lummi island wine tasting ides of March ’24

Spring Hours

• Fridays 4-6 pm
  
• Saturdays 3-5 pm
  

 

 

    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

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

lummi island wine tasting oct 13 ’23

Hours this weekend

Open Friday 4-6  or…“anytime for wine emergencies!”

This week’s wine tasting

J. Laurens Cremant de Limoux      France   $16
Long before there was “champagne,” there was cremant de Limoux,  a little area SW of Carcasonne a sparkling wine with a creamy mousse texture, notes of baked apple, prune, and yeasty minerality.

The Wolftrap Syrah Mourvèdre Viognier ’18      South Africa    $12
Aromas of ripe plums, red currants, violets, Italian herbs and exotic spices lead to vibrant flavors of darker berries and spicy plum with hints of orange peel that linger on a juicy finish. Also way over-delivers for its 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!

Seeded 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 adds great flavor and crunch. And just a little honey for some sweetness. A great all around bread that is full of flavor – $5/loaf

Polenta Levain – Also made with a levain 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 is not the sweet corn cranberry bread that I have done in the past that is enriched with milk and butter, this bread is a nice rustic loaf with great corn flavor. – 5/loaf

and pastry this week…

Gibassiers – A traditional french pastry that incorporates the flavors from the southern France region. Made with a delicious sweet dough full of milk, butter, eggs and olive oil. The addition of orange flower water, candied orange peel and anise seed bring great flavor to these pastries. After baking they are brushed with melted butter and sprinkled with more sugar. Ooh La La a delightful pastry to go along with your morning coffee or tea.

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.

 

 

Wine of the Week: Marchetti Villa Bonomi Conero Riserva    ’19      Italy       $27

 

 

 

 

Economics of the Heart: Telling Truth from Lies

A lot of us old-timers well remember this lyric from the sixties, when social reaction to the Vietnam war, combined with the sudden widespread popularity of marijuana, created a youth counterculture, some great music, and widespread protest against the war. Timothy Leary neatly bookmarked the era with his beginning slogan (Tune in, Turn on, Drop out) and its sequel a few years later, “Question Authority, Think for Yourself.”

Events of 1968 were an abrupt wake-up call to some dark corners of the American body politic with the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in the prime of their intellectual and political lives, followed by the election of Richard Nixon to the Presidency. Still, in those days there were lots of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, but with a lot of overlap. The Supreme Court was also balanced and prudent, news organizations generally reported actual facts, and  disagreements were mostly matters of degree and balance. Those balances made for a relatively functional government.

That all changed with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan as President, whose primary mission was rolling back the New Deal. He courted Southern Democrats with major drops in financial assistance to the poor, the sick, the elderly, the insissues likeane, and minorities, and “throwing the welfare queens out of the lifeboat.” His budget director came up with “supply side” economics, an intellectually bereft theory that proclaimed that the rich were the real drivers of the economy because they reinvest their profits in new businesses that hire more workers, making the pie bigger for everyone.

Since the New Deal, the dominant macroeconomic model had been the widely accepted Keynesian theory that total demand of consumers is what drives an economy, as part of a circular flow in which households exchange labor for wages and spend their wages on the goods and services they produced, while business invested their sales in capital assets and hired workers to operate them. Everyone had a place. Reaganomics did indeed make billions of dollars for corporations and wealthy stockholders, but from 1980 to the present wealth and income became more and more skewed toward the richest Americans. In today’s world, many CEO’s earn hundreds for every dollar a worker earns.

All of this came to mind while watching this interview last night on PBS with a representative from the Atlantic Council, a think tank in international affairs focused on maintaining international security and global economic prosperity across North America and Europe. These last eight years of the Tweetster (he of the 25,000 documented lies noted by the Washington Post) have, for millions of Americans, replaced truth with sloganized “alternative facts” that have muddied all waters, evaded two impeachments, and have kept our nation on edge for three years by pretending that he actually won the 2020 election. Even worse, millions of people still believe it! And that has been made possible by 24/7 carefully scripted 24/7 Fake News on Fox, social media, and talk radio. 

The interview conversation focused on organizations around the world which make a business of propagating false narratives for political reasons and asserting that there are all kinds of reasons why it is not generally illegal to lie in politics or in the press, while there can be liability. And that has brought our nation to this head-scratching place where a substantial portion of our population actually believes that the 2020 election was stolen, that Hunter Biden is more of a crook than the Tweetster, and even, as Nixon once asserted “if the President does it, it’s not illegal.”

It is hard to imagine how civilization can long endure in a world which makes no distinctions between truth and lies, fact and fiction, rules-conforming and rules-breaking. Until recently our laws have generally worked fairly well at making such distinctions. But it has all gone downhill since the Gingrich Republicans abandoned polity for shouting insults like five-year-olds. The problem seems to be that the Right gotten tired of playing by the rules, and as periodically happens in human history, some people are only okay when they have complete authority over everyone and will do anything to get it.

Along the same lines, CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists) offers an interesting exploration of the related issue of Deciding who decides which news is fake, including issues like: 

• how abuse of media laws by authoritarians around the world is a clear warning against government regulation of information,
• to avoid the privatization of censorship, any self-regulation by tech companies must be transparent, subject to independent oversight, and include a path to remedy for those affected;
• how the increasing intrusion of misinformation and propaganda in domestic media are damaging existing democracies in places including the U.S. and U.K. by interfering in domestic politics like US elections and the British referendum on Brexit.

Bottom line: Democracy can only persist when the people share a set of common values and agree to the set of rules everyone will follow to make it work. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

lummi island wine tasting may 26 ’23

Hours this weekend:

We’re back!

The wine shop will be open for sales and tastings: Friday, May 26, from 4-6pm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Friday Bread Pickup This Week

Black Pepper Walnut- Made with a nice mix of bread flour, fresh milled whole wheat and rye. A fair amount of black pepper and toasted walnuts give this bread great flavor with a distinct peppery bite. Excellent paired with all sorts of meats and cheese…and wine, of course! – $5/loaf

Four Seed Buttermilk – This bread includes all the elements of whole wheat, but does so separately by adding cracked wheat and bran in to the bread flour instead of milling whole wheat berries. It also has buttermilk and oil which will make for a tender bread as well as adding a little tang. Finally it is finished with with a bit of honey and sunflower pumpkin and sesame seeds and some toasted millet – $5/loaf

and pastry this week…

Kyoto 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 weren’t enough, topped with a black sesame streusel before baking. Ooh la la, what’s not to like?!  –2/$5

To get on the bread order list, click on the “Contact Us” link above and fill out the form. Each week’s bread menu is sent to the list each Sunday, for ordering by Tuesday, for pickup on Friday. Simple, right..? If you will be visiting the island and would like to order bread for your visit, at least a week’s notice is recommended for pickup the following Friday.

 

This week’s wine tasting

Maryhill Winemaker’s White ’19     Washington      $14
Sauv blanc, viognier, semillon, albarino, pinot gris; careful early morning harvest, slow press cycle, limited oak, and blended to keep each varietal’s profile in both aromas and flavors– a complex, versatile, and tasty white blend!

La Quercia Montepulciano d’Abruzzo  Riserva  ’17     Italy      $19
From 50-yr-old vines; rich, full-bodied and rustic in expression, with rich notes of cocoa, rhubarb, blackberry, and herbs; long, lingering finish of juicy black cherry, with a silky/velvety mouthfeel.

Eola Hills Barrel Select Reserve Pinot Noir  ’19    Oregon    $27
From best barrels from the 2019 harvest; classic, Burgundian-style pinot, with nose of fresh raspberries, earth, wet autumn leaves, and a silky palate of cherry and strawberry with a lingering cranberry tartness on the finish. 

 

Economics of the Heart: Rules and Values

Civilization is a complex business that depends on some combination of broad consensus about the rules, who makes them, and a will to follow them. All manner of organizational structures have come and gone in human history. Our hunch for a long time has been  that the default form of human economic organization is to revert to some form of feudalism when resources become scarce, or power and wealth get concentrated into too few hands, and the masses are relegated to perpetual serfdom, scratching the earth like chickens for meager nourishment, and even the Overseers are still slaves.

We have long thought of the Reagan 80’s as The Decade of the Bottom Line, when Republicans finally got to declare open war on the New Deal, made lots of people think Government was the real Bad Guy, and preached the mantra that making the rich even richer was the tide that would raise all ships. Under the auspices of unleashing the goodies in the Big Pinata of free market competition to the masses, taxes (you know, how the public sector must pay for everything) were slashed on the wealthy and corporations while spending was cut on the poor, the hungry, the sick, the insane, and the helpless. By the end of the decade the FCC had declared Open Season for “alternative facts” and the airways filled with 24/7 liberal- bashing on radio and TV. 

The 90’s (the Decade of Vapid Pragmatism) opened the floodgates of Rush Limbaugh’s ‘always angry all the time’ talk radio and countless imitators all trying to out-outrage each other. That constant barrage of hyperbolic lies  became Fox News, Newt Gingrich, and 24/7 rural AM radio. The mentality was perfectly illustrated when one local Whatcom County State legislator declared on the State House floor that there should be no Spanish-speaking classes in Washington schools, because (I am not making this up): “if English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me!” 

The 00’s (the aughts…?) ushered in more tax cuts for the wealthy in both 2001 and 2005 (“It’s Our Due,” as VP Darth Cheney put it), concentrating wealth into even fewer hands while invading two countries and starting wars that lasted for the next twenty years and caused the 2008 recession. It is hard to know whether the Ambient Hypocrisy in our society and the News we see, hear, and read are the causes or the symptoms (or both) of the debilitating polarization we see all around us– or whether these are all effects of deliberate information manipulation by unknown players in an escalating global Cyber War.

Either way, somehow we have to find our way back to a set of common values and goals even while deliberate forces do their best to sabotage them for their own reasons. Scary stuff.

 

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