Sunday Morning Whiskey Run

For the first time since before Prohibition, it is legal in Washington state to purchase a bottle of liquor on Sunday. Not only have the blue laws passed into history, the state liquor stores were closed permanently on 31 May 2012. Since Prohibition, Washington had limited liquor sales to state-run and contract liquor stores. The state managed distribution and set prices. In 2011, voters passed Initiative 1183, ending the old system. I-1183 was authored and heavily financed by Costco and to a lesser extent by Trader Joe's.

The effects of I-1183 have revived the debates from last fall. Consumers rushed to grocery stores Friday morning to buy liquor with their eggs and milk, the news media covered the shopping spree, and the shock of new prices--mostly higher, some vastly so--have stimulated conversation. Before Prohibition, access to alcohol was limited by a variety of measures in states and municipalities. Drug stores were a principal outlet in many locales, for spirits have been medicine since they were first discovered in the ancient human past. There's now something poetic and rooted in history that even in Washington state, I can walk into Walgreens at 6:00am on a  Sunday morning to buy a bottle of Jack Daniels.

Dry Fly Distilling, Washington state's first post-Prohibition distillery, has more than doubled the retail outlets stocking its product in its home state. They have labored hard the past half-year stepping up production in preparation. Project V Single Silo Vodka made from the wheat on a single eastern Washington family farm is now available in Spokane for the first time. That increase in quality product availability should be a principle consequence of free markets. But, I-1183 offered something somewhat different from a true free market, something far more in line with the traditions of American capitalism.

Unfortunately, but predictably, news coverage of the changes resemble press releases from retailers more than any sort of investigative journalism. Prices that would have shamed gangsters during Prohibition are visible in plain sight on store shelves, but almost entirely absent from newspapers.

I-1183 is a mixture of long deferred blessings and unmitigated curses, some of which are covered in the news, and more of which are found in the comments.

An Everett, Washington news story offers several errors beginning with a lead sentence that reveals the authors do not understand the term "blue laws." "A Spirited Start to Liquor Sales" 2 June 2012, HeraldNet.

Never pour the glass that full

One of this article's howlers: "Reasons for the prices lie in the rules of Initiative 1183." Several retailers and fellow customers were repeating that mantra as I shopped yesterday. "Taxes raised the prices," is another version. But, that story falls short of explaining why a fifth of Blanton's was $55 including taxes last week, and now sells for $65 before the 20.5% Liquor Sales Tax and the $2.83 Liter Tax ($3.77 per liter). The highest round numbers explaining the Initiative noted a 27% tax, and that somehow accounts for a 68% price increase? I don't think so.

Many articles banter about the figures that prices are 10-30% higher, while Costco claims that its prices are 5% lower. The goat cheese that I buy at Costco costs almost exactly what I pay at Fred Meyer with the slight difference that I buy six times the quantity at Costco for that price. When a Costco price is 5% below a norm, the membership fee is not really worth the cost. But, the old state liquor store prices (long lamented as higher than prices in many other states) are no longer the norm. Much higher prices are. For the limited selection available at Costco, they will have the best price.

A Reuters story, "Liquor Sticker Shock Stirs Up Washington State Drinkers," repeats this strange and inaccurate 10-30% figure. Much of the rest of the article, however, shows more evidence of historical perspective and journalistic inquiry than is available elsewhere.

The most heavily circulated article seems to be "Retailers, Customers Welcome Wash Booze Sales," by Shannon Dininny and Elaine Thompson (link is to Bloomberg Businessweek). I read this article in the Seattle Times, and then ran into dozens more looking for something with a little better balanced coverage. There's not much wrong with what the article says, but most of the story is absent.

The Seattle Times offers a feeble effort to measure the price differences in "Help Us Measure How Liquor Prices Have Changed." The newspaper offers a list of old state prices and a field where readers can fill in new prices. But, their selection is limited to top-selling products, which quite naturally are the ones most likely to go down in price. One reader pointed out the foolishness. Many others listed their prices not in the database, but in the comments. There, one finds documentation of the 30-75% price increases on whiskey manufactured outside Lynchburg, Tennessee.

Suffering a late-season flu this past week, I was not among the customers who rushed the stores on Friday. Feeling better, a bit, on Saturday, I had an urge to explore the new world of liquor retail sales. I was delightfully surprised to find Blanton's Bourbon on the shelf at the Fred Meyer three blocks from my home. This small store does not stock non-sparkling wine that exceeds $26 per bottle in price, and only exceeded $25 when they recently added King Estate 2010 Pinot Noir. Previously, L'Ecole No. 41 2008 Merlot was the most expensive bottle. The price of Blanton's, however, assures me that I will not find it there in September. I've bought the Pinot and several bottles of the Merlot. I will not be buying the Blanton's unless I find it on close-out discount that brings it down to the old liquor store prices. I'll be going to Post Falls, Idaho to buy Kentucky bourbon.

It was Blanton's that turned me on to bourbon when I was in graduate school, transforming my drinking pattern from youthful drunkenness to adult cultivation of taste. It was a dinner at an academic conference at L'Ecole that turned me on to Washington Merlot. It's nice to see both at Freddies. The difference in price structure is another story. That's where the journalists should be looking. So far, they do not seem to see past the press releases put out by industry propagandists (I am not referring to the manufacturing industry).

Johnny Appleseed

Long, long after,
When settlers put up beam and rafter,
They asked of the birds: "Who gave this fruit?
Who watched this fence till the seeds took root?
Who gave these boughs?" They asked the sky,
And there was no reply.
But the robin might have said,
"To the farthest West he has followed the sun,
His life and his empire just begun."
Vachel Lindsey, "In Praise of Johnny Appleseed" (1923)

In my pre-teen and early teen years, I read every book presenting American folktales and legends that was available in our little Air Force base library. Some of my favorites included stories of deforestation (Paul Bunyan), the futile battle against mechanization (John Henry), and the introduction of alien plant species (Johnny Appleseed). The books that pulled me into these stories were fanciful and aimed at young readers. The stories were uprooted from their origins as descriptions of actual lives, exaggerated the known facts, and worked into the realm of myth.

The real Johnny Appleseed died in Indiana in 1845, according to an obituary printed in the Fort Wayne Sentinel (22 March 1845). He was tall, a preacher taken with Emanuel Swedenborg's writings, and planted nurseries rather than spreading seeds willy-nilly. A recent book delves into the myth and known history, making a strong effort to separate the two. Howard Means, Johnny Appleseed: The Man, the Myth, the American Story (2011) offers a detailed biography of the life, activities, and beliefs of John Chapman, the real Johnny Appleseed.

As I remember the stories, I was free to imagine that his seed sowing enterprise took him further west, and that he might have ended his days near present-day Wenatchee. My memory is almost certainly faulty and found its freedom in confusion between the Northwest of early American history--the Ohio Country--and the far Northwest, or Pacific Northwest--a term created by railroad publicists in the late nineteenth century. Even the Disney short, Johnny Appleseed (1948), which I almost certainly watched sometime in the 1960s or early 1970s, places Johnny Appleseed in the Ohio country.

The heart of the Disney film pits cultivation of orchards and promotion of religion against a vast wilderness of dangerous animals. Indians appear on the margins, part of the crowd singing and dancing during the harvest festival. The wary animals first believed the human who moved into a clearing and began to plant seeds was a curious intruder who needed to leave. But, none could tell him so. Finally a skunk went out to investigate and was on the verge of attacking, when Johnny began to stroke its fur. The hero of the story wins over the animals. The narrator emphasizes that he is the first human they had seen without knife or gun. Johnny Appleseed thus fits into the mythic structure of humanity's shift from hunting to cultivation, a reflection of the Neolithic revolution and the rise of civilization. The human story of the beginnings of civilization as long ago as ten millennia ago gets repeated in the New Eden, the American wilderness. See "Neolithic Revolution and American Indians" for another episode in this mythic story.


Apples and Cherries in the Pacific Northwest

Today, Washington state leads the United States in apple production. New York City might be the "big apple," but the apple is more a symbol of the far Northwest than of anywhere else. The apple has become as much a symbol of Pacific Northwest regional culture as the salmon and the seemingly endless evergreen forests. But, while salmon have all but disappeared from every region outside Alaska (and even there the proposed Pebble Mine threatens the last watersheds in full health), and while timber jobs in Washington have become scarce, the apple thrives.

John Chapman never made it this far west. The origins of apples in the Pacific Northwest begin in the Willamette Valley and just over the Columbia River at Fort Vancouver. In the 1820s, the Hudson's Bay Company cultivated many food growing plants from seeds. From these plants, Joseph Garvais cultivated the first substantial apple orchards. Contemporaneous with John Chapman in the Ohio Country, Garvais and other retired Hudson Bay Company employees developed agriculture in Oregon Country.

But it was the introduction of grafted fruit trees that caused the region's agriculture to blossom. These first arrived via wagon along the Oregon Trail courtesy of an Iowa farmer who headed west. In 1847, Henderson Lewelling crossed the country with his family and three wagons. Two of the wagons transported some seven hundred small trees. Once in Oregon, Lewelling went into the nursery business with William Meek. When the gold rush lured Lewelling and Meek to California, where they saw opportunity for more profits developing agriculture, they sold their nursery in Milwaukie, Oregon to Henderson's younger brother, Seth. According to Ronald Irvine, The Wine Project (1997), Meek won an award for wine at the California State Fair in 1859.

Seth Lewelling thrived in the nursery business. His foreman for the orchards, Ah Bing, has been immortalized in the name of a popular fruit that he helped originate. Today, Washington state not only leads the nation in sweet cherry production, but accounts for more than half of the nation's total production.

In the world of legend and myth, everyone knows of Johnny Appleseed. The story of agriculture in the far Northwest, however, offers many less well-known, but every bit as compelling stories of such men as Joseph Garvais, Henderson Lewelling, and Ah Bing.

Washington Wine: An Epicurean History

Missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman lived in the Walla Walla valley 1836-1847. Grapes were among the plantings in their garden, but they were teetotalers and did not make wine. They did, however, observe others drinking local wine during their visits to Fort Vancouver. According to Walter J. Clore's chronology in the appendix of The Wine Project: Washington State's Winemaking History (1997) by Ronald Irvine, the Hudson's Bay Company began growing grapes at Fort Vancouver 1824-1825. These were grown from seeds brought over from England and of unknown variety.

By the time of the Civil War, there were more than 80 varieties of grapes growing in the Walla Walla Valley. Italian immigrant Frank Orselli was selling wine by 1865. In 1876, the Walla Walla Statesman reported that he "has been experimenting in making wine" (Irvine and Clore, 406).

During Prohibition it was legal for a head of household to make 200 gallons of wine per year for personal use. A few commercial winemakers, especially in California, managed to limp along during these dark years making communion wine for the Catholic Church. Two years after the repeal of Prohibition, the Washington Wine Producers Association was established.

In 1960, Walter Clore and associates began grape growing research for Washington State University. This publicly funded research joined forces with private enterprise over the next several decades to develop the largest North American wine industry outside of California. Today, Columbia Valley wines are world renowned and the Walla Walla Valley bustles with tourists during the summer months. They come along the Lewis and Clark Trail, and via other routes, to visit the missionary graves at the Whitman Mission, and they come to sample and buy Washington wines.


My Wine Journey

Like the Whitmans, I spent a couple of years as a teetotaler in the 1980s. Fortunately, that period had come to an end by the time that I attended my first academic conference as a graduate student, the 1989 Pacific Northwest American Studies Association annual conference. It was held at Whitman College, and the Saturday evening banquet began with a bus ride west to Lowden (formerly known as Frenchtown). We had hors d'oeuvres, wine, and dinner at L'Ecole No. 41 winery, Walla Walla's third winery in the modern era. They were just beginning to garner accolades from the international community. I'm fuzzy on some aspects of my personal history, but I might credit the wine I had that evening for the fact that for the better part of the next decade, choosing wine instead of beer or bourbon invariably meant that I would choose a Merlot from Washington state.

I have not had a glass of bourbon since May, and I've drank very little beer. Credit wine. The past few years I've been developing the beginning of some interest in wine, and beginning to educate my palate. Perhaps four years ago, my wife and I sat down with Kevin Zraly, Windows on the World: Complete Wine Course (2007), reading and drinking our way through a glass each of Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, and Chardonnay. The past few months, I've been rediscovering the wines grown in my home state. I'm learning to pair some of these wines with food. Yesterday, we tasted some wine at the Spokane Public Market and came home with some Bridge Press Cellars Pinot Blanc--a Spokane wine made from Willamette Valley, Oregon grapes.

I'll return to wine history in a future blog post. For now, take a look at this gallery of meals and some of my own recipes.


Food and Wine Gallery

I learned to cook from my mother when I was quite young, and also learned some cooking in the Boy Scouts. In 1975, over a campfire I cooked two dozen eggs over easy without breaking one. In the past two years, I've been learning new cooking methods from Food & Wine Magazine. Recently I started photographing some of my meals and posting the images to Facebook. Many of the recipes come from the magazine. I was surprised, thus, to discover that my pairings with Washington wines rarely featured recipes from this magazine, but from other magazines and cookbooks, and mostly my own inventions. Even so, the influence of Food & Wine is evident in many details.

In late spring or early summer most years, fresh Copper River salmon becomes available in Spokane grocery stores. I usually buy one fish and get four or five meals--some steaks, some fillets. This year, as the price kept dropping due to an abundant catch, I bought three fish. I butterflied the second one and smoked it on my gas grill. It was topped with a rub of herbs and spices, but I failed to record the mixture. The salad is an old standard of fresh basil from the garden, tomatoes, and mozzarella cheese. I snapped the photo before drizzling the balsamic vinegar. A few spears of asparagus were grilled over the flame on one side of the grill as the salmon finished. These were first sprayed with olive oil and lightly sprinkled with salt and pepper. The wine was a 2008 Waterbrook Melange Noir (less than $15).

Waterbrook Winery was founded in 1984 as Walla Walla's fourth modern winery. When my spouse, my sister and her spouse, my nephew and his girlfriend, and I made our recent pilgrimage to Walla Walla for wine tastings, we began with a wonderful hour on the patio at Waterbrook. This meal with Alaska Sockeye and Washington wine was one month prior to that trip.

Our second winery on that trip was L'Ecole No. 41, where I had eaten dinner in 1989. My trip there with a bunch of college English and history teachers is the earliest memory that I have of eating dolmades. Since then, I have learned to make them, and they were hors d'oeuvres for the anniversary dinner that I prepared for my wife last month.

Naturally, we tasted and purchased some Merlot when we visited L'Ecole No. 41. We did not start with the Merlot. Prior to the trip, I had been reading Paul Gregutt, Washington Wines and Wineries: The Essential Guide (2007). He praises the success of L'Ecole's Semillon, and we began with that. My wife generally refuses to get interested in any wine that we can see through, but she liked the Semillon. She found the Estate Luminesce exciting! We returned with a couple of bottles of each. When she found some enticing summer recipes in an article in More magazine the following week, I had the beginning of a fine pairing. I made the cold cucumber and honeydew soup from "Picnics for Grownups," pulled an old walleye recipe from America's Favorite Fish Recipes (1992) for some Alaskan cod, and served one of the bottles of Luminesce.

When I started reading Food & Wine, they seemed obsessed with flatiron steak, and I've made a couple of their recipes. After the Fourth of July weekend included some heavy eating with family, we were in the mood for some salads. I made a simple green salad with my own something like Caesar dressing on Tuesday, followed it up with the cucumber soup and cod above on Wednesday, and on Thursday used some of Tuesday's dressing to marinade asparagus and broccoli.

Something Like Caesar

1 Tbs grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
olive oil (about 4 Tbs)
2 anchovies finely chopped
2 cloves garlic minced
1 Tbs Dijon Mustard
1 Tbs Worcester Sauce
salt and pepper

I put the cheese in the bottom of my salad bowl and cover it with olive oil. Then add the anchovies, garlic, mustard and Worcester Sauce and stir, adding more olive oil until the consistency seems about like bottled Caesar. A little bit of salt and a little more pepper, more stirring, and the dressing is done.

The quantity is too much for one salad feeding two or three people, so I spoon about two-third's of the dressing into a container that goes into the refrigerator. Leaving the portion that I plan to use, I then put my greens on top of the dressing and gently stir. Putting the greens on the dressing and mixing instead of the dressing on the greens is a technique that I've adopted from several recipes in Food & Wine, and from "Chef Bobby Flay's Salad Smarts," a sidebar in Food & Wine Annual Cookbook 2011 (42).

In preparing the asparagus and broccoli dish in the photo, I first retrieved the dressing from the refrigerator and let it come up to room temperature. Then, I prepared the steak marinade by putting a diced onion, rosemary, and sage in the Magic Bullet to mostly liquify. I spread the mixture on the steak and let it sit for an hour or so. I washed the asparagus, breaking off the thickest part of the stems, and washed the broccoli. In a plastic bag, I spooned some of the leftover dressing on the vegetables, closed the bag with plenty of air inside and shook to coat. I let the vegetables sit on the counter for most of an hour.

When it was time to cook, I scraped the onion mixture off the steak. I grilled the vegetables in a grilling basket. When they were nearly done, I started grilling the steak (about four minutes per side). Meanwhile, I sauteed the onions in some olive oil with fresh oyster mushrooms. After removing the steak from the grill, I sliced it, placed four slices on each plate and topped with the mushroom and onion mixture, then plucked a couple of cilantro flowers and set these on top.

The steaks and vegetable mix were served with a bottle of 2008 Waterbrook Cabernet Sauvignon.

At the Spokane Public Market, yesterday, we found some fresh Walla Walla sweet onions, and some lamb steaks from a local farmer. I mixed some dried mint with smaller amounts of cumin, and thyme, sprinkled it on the lamb steaks, and let set an hour.

I quartered half an onion, then sliced it. I sauteed the onion in olive oil until it started to brown, then added one-half cup Moscato wine and cooked until the wine evaporated. Then I added a handful of walnuts that I had roasted in the oven for eight minutes at 350 F.

While the onions and walnuts continued to brown on medium heat, I started the steaks, grilling seven or eight minutes per side. I poured a little white wine vinegar into the pan with the onions and nuts, and cooked until it evaporated. During the last two minutes of cooking the steaks, I threw about three cups of baby spinach leaves into the pan with the onions--stirring constantly until thoroughly wilted.

The lamb and spinach were served with a bottle of Woodward Canyon non-vintage red. The bottle had been opened earlier for the hors d'oeuvres, plank grilled figs with pancetta and goat cheese, a recipe from Epicurious.com. Woodward Canyon was Walla Walla's second modern winery, and it was the third we visited during our pilgrimage. Their non-vintage red was the discovery of the trip--an extremely nice wine for $19 per bottle.

Our wine budget accommodates very few wines above $20 per bottle, and generally only on special occasions. During a trip to Walla Walla this spring for a work conference, my wife picked up a couple of Spring Valley Vineyard wines that are expensive by our standards. We opened a bottle of 2007 Frederick for our anniversary. I fixed a four-course meal for the occasion. It was a study in pairings.

The first course consisted of dolmades (my recipe) and goat cheese stuffed grape leaves from Food & Wine. To be honest, the $50 bottle of Frederick did not seem particularly impressive with the hors d'oeuvres. It was good, but not great.

The second course was a beet, pickled cheery, and crispy shallot salad from Food & Wine. It clashed with the wine, bringing out bitter flavors.

For the main course, I grilled a Turkish rack of lamb from Jamie Purviance, Weber's Time to Grill (2011). Together with Frederick, the lamb was exquisite and the wine showed its grace and complexity. It was a perfect pairing. After the main course, we were satiated and delayed dessert for a few hours.

Dessert was another Food & Wine recipe, except that I added some goat cheese and nuts. We ate the dessert with a glass of the plum wine used to marinate the plums.

Cursed Hops

Ezra Meeker was a pioneer in developing the agriculture of Washington state, including the first hops. Today, there are no hops grown in western Washington, but the Yakima Valley grows more than 70% of US hops, and accounts for 1/4 of the world's production. See "Crop Profile for Hops in Washington" (1999).



Hops have one use: making beer. Not surprisingly, churches that were active in the movement advocating Prohibition celebrated the insect infestation that destroyed hops in western Washington in the late nineteenth century. A letter Ezra Meeker sent to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in September, 1895 reveals cultural and ideological faultlines. Meeker reprinted the letter in Ventures and Adventures of Ezra Meeker (1909).

To the Editor:
In this morning's reprt of the Methodist conference I notice under the heading "A Curse on the Hop Crop," that Preacher Hanson, of Puyallup, reported he had some good news from that great hop country--the hop crop, the main support of the people was a failure; the crop had been cursed by God. Whereupon Bishop Bowman said "Good" and from all over the room voices could be heard giving utterance to the fervent ejaculation, "Thank God."
For the edification of the reverend fathers and fervent brethren I wish to publish to them and to the world that I have beat God, for I have 500 acres of hops at Puyallup and Kent that are free from lice, the "curse of God," and that I believe it was the work of an emulsion of whale oil soap and quassie sprayed on the vines that thwarted God's purpose to "curse" me and others who exterminated the lice.
One is almost ready to ask if this is indeed the nineteenth century of enlightenment, to hear such utterances gravely made by men supposed to be expounders of that great religion of love as promulgated by the Great Teacher.
I want to recall to the memory of the Rev. Mr. Hanson that the church in which he has been preaching for a year past was built in great part by money contributed from gains of this business "Cursed by God." For myself I can inform him that, as a citizen of Puyallup, I contributed $400 to buy the ground upon which that edifice is built, every cent of which came from this same hop business "cursed by God." I would "thank God" if they would return the money and thus ease their guilty consciences.
Ezra Meeker
(Ventures and Adventures, 288-289)

Meeker points out that his hops failed nevertheless, and that he did not get back his $400.