Washington Winery releases wine called "The Denier"

I received this submission, which is interesting as well as business promoting.  I have no objections, and check out their page on climate.~ctm

Guest post informercial by Tom Davis and Tracey Degraff

We are Tom Davis and Tracey DeGraff – we own a small winery in Blaine, Washington. We’ve had enough with the Global Warming/Climate Change scam. We are fighting back. We came out of the closet three years ago, posting on our new website a message stating that it was our company’s corporate social responsibility to speak out against the eco-hype and stand for honest science. We also confessed that when we started our winery in 2002 – we chose our winery’s name GLM, short for “Glacial Lake Missoula” as a response to Global Warming hype – as method to introduce people to our planet’s real climactic history.

In 2001, on our travels scouting potential vineyards in eastern Washington State, we noticed many bizarre features to the landscape, which we were at a loss to explain – until we soon learned about the floods, discovered by the great geologist, J Harlen Bretz. He called these the “Spokane Floods”, and they were caused by a massive lake impounded by a glacial finger of the giant ice sheet that covered all of Canada, around 18,000 – 13,000 years ago. The ice-dam was where present-day Lake Pend Oreille is, and the city of Sandpoint, ID. The Clark Fork River became impounded by the Purcell Lobe of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, and water levels rose to a height of 2000 feet deep at the ice-dam, and 1000 feet deep where Missoula, MT is today – near the eastern extent of the lake.

This prehistoric lake, Glacial Lake Missoula, is a synecdoche for Climate Change: during this period the climate made the rapid y0-yo climactic changes of the Younger Dryas, and then the ice-age ended with the dawning of the Holocene maximum. It produced floods that if they occurred today – would obliterate the city of Spokane, WA and drown Portland, OR, by turning the Willamette Valley into an inland sea.

The waters scoured away some of the beautiful loess soil that had collected on the basalt Columbia plateau over hundreds of thousands of years, leaving islands of soil that are now among the most productive farmlands in the world. This region of eastern Washington was called the Channeled Scablands by Bretz, an amazing region of flood exposed basalt bedrock and islands of loess hills that survived every flood (it happened over eighty times). The flood’s rich sediments were dumped mainly in slack-water lakes that covered the Horse Heaven Hills, Yakima Valley, Columbia Valley and Willamette Valleys – all major wine producing areas today. The floods are the largest terrestrial floods ever known, the first with a flow rate equivalent to ten times the flow of all the rivers of the world. All of this occurred (as far as we know) without human influence.

J Harlen Bretz was a young PhD graduate in geology from the University of Chicago, and he had been interested in the unusual features of the desert landscape of eastern Washington since 1911. Eastern Washington has many anomalous geological features – huge erratics, hanging valleys, giant plunge pools – all far south of the terminal moraines of the various lobes of the monstrous Cordilleran Ice Sheet. These anomalous features could not be explained by the usual understanding of glaciation. Bretz could see the evidence for a flood all around him, but had no source for such an enormous amount of water.

Another geologist, J.T. Pardee, had also discovered in 1910, that a massive lake had filled the mountains of Western Montana and Idaho. He found massive gravel bars, giant ripples, and ancient shorelines high in these mountains. This massive pre-historic lake was the logical source of the flood waters that scoured Bretz’s Channeled Scablands. Pardee was in the audience for Bretz’s 1927 lecture on his new theory, but unfortunately, he did not talk to Bretz about his potential source for the floods – perhaps from fear of creating controversy. In a textbook example of science by consensus, the main contingent of geologists rejected Bretz’s hypothesis for violating their dogma called Uniformitarianism.

Uniformitarianism is predicated on the very sensible notion that “the present is the key to the past”, that the processes operating in the present – like erosion and sedimentation, also operated in the past – but it dictated that geological changes were always gradual and slow. Perhaps this dogma arose from the necessity to distance modern geology from stories like the biblical Noahic flood, itself part of the previous scientific dogma of Catastrophism.  For violating the uniformitarian dogma, both scientists Bretz (1927) and Pardee (1942) were ridiculed, and their work largely ignored.

Many decades later, a new generation of geologists, led by Victor R. Baker, vindicated Bretz’s and Pardee’s work. Satellite imagery also helped change minds. The moral of this absurd chapter in science is that evidence must guide theory and that science is never settled. In 1979, when he was 96 years old, Bretz was awarded the Penrose Medal from the Geological Society of America – final recognition of his great contribution to science.

The very late acceptance of Bretz’ theory by the geological community, is an important lesson in the annals of science by consensus. To honor the man that bucked consensus and relied solely on empirical evidence to form his brilliant theory – J Harlen Bretz, we released a new Cabernet Sauvignon wine called the Denier. (The wine has won a Double-Gold Award at the 2019 Seattle Wine Awards!)

As for our winery – in 17 years of doing business we haven’t had any horrible push-back from our customers for being global warming Deniers – most people are open-minded, and also appreciate learning a chapter in their State’s geological history that they may not have been taught about, one that also has radically affected wine-growing in most of Washington’s wine regions.

A shocking number of people also know that CO2 is a natural product of winemaking, and that the grapevine requires CO2 to make those grapes. In fact, about 95% of the mass (minus the water) of each grape harvest comes directly from CO2 in the atmosphere. The remaining 5% comes from nutrients in the soil. The Winegrape harvest in Washington State in 2016, was 260,000 tons. Minus the water component of grapes (81%), it means that growers produced 49,400 tons of fruit solids that derived almost entirely from atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. Somehow this is the same poisonous gas that will bring about Armageddon.

It has slowly dawned on us that grapevines are mining carbon out of air, which we winemakers are partially releasing back to the atmosphere (through fermentation), and that the wine drinker may sequester this remaining carbon in his/her cellar, before ultimately consuming it. We are all part of the carbon cycle, and it is all possible because of the amazing, benevolent, trace gas – CO2.

For more information on the Glacial Lake Missoula floods: www.glmwine.com, www.hugefloods.com

See our YouTube video (HD) recreating what Glacial Lake Missoula would have looked like:

Purchase the Denier and other GLM wines at: www.vinoshipper.com