The Pacific Coast Oyster Wine Competition, sponsored by Taylor Shellfish, is an annual affair to identify and recommend good "oyster wines." Crisp, white, cold, but beyond those characteristics, it's a pretty narrow band of wine styles that actually work well with oysters, You need a vibrant combination of glycogen (to provide sweetness), minerality and acidity: all more or less dry, crisp, clean-finishing.
We started with 124 wines (72 from California, 26 each from Oregon and Washington), we being
Tom Arthur, GM of Elliott's Oyster House; Bruce Sturgeon, GM of Blueacre Seafood; Dr. Gerry Warren, longtime head of the Seattle Wine Society; plus myself, all corralled by oyster guru and competition founder Jon Rowley. Our job, over five days, was to taste each wine with an oyster and name our favorites. The oysters were freshly shucked Kumomotos; the bottles were wrapped in foil and poured "blind" by servers at Anthony's Homeport (and Rowley himself, at one point). On the sixth day, the 30 leading contenders were narrowed down to 20 finalists, which Rowley will now take on the road. He's got tastings in LA and San Francisco later this month before returning to Seattle for a final-final round.
"Not many wines go with oysters," says Anthony's VP Lane Hoss. "That's why we are thankful to have this competition. Oysters are popular and becoming more so. We wait for the results every year."
If you're new to Cornichon's blog, here's a rundown of the oyster wine competition over the past several years:
More and more restaurants are serving oysters on the half shell these days, and the demand for matching wines hasn't slackened. "Restaurants love having the winning wines," says Rowley.
Compare the care taken to find truly excellent matches to this simplistic piece in The Daily Meal.
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