Score one for Taylor Shellfish Farms and Jon Rowley: this is the 20th year for the Pacific Coast Oyster Wine competition, a genial promotion that draws close to 150 entries these days and ends up with ten wines designated as ideal "Oyster Wines" on menus around the country.
Score two for the 20 whites that made it through the prelims and were poured at the Seattle finals, held at Anthony's Homeport on Shillshole.
And score three for the judges (In Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle) who chew the chilled oysters and sip the chilled wines.
Bill Taylor wasn't happy with this year's kumamotos so he ordered up the shigokus, an oyster his company developed at its shellfish farm on Willapa Bay. the shigoku--"ultimate" in Japanese--grow in bags that rise and fall with the tide; the twice-daily tumbling chips the edges and forces the oyster to develop a scoop shape. Rowan Jacobsen, author of "A Geography of Oysters," had this to say about the shigokus: "A small, dense, cornucopia of an oyster. A light, clean taste of cucumber and salt, with a finish of water chestnut and Jerusalem artichoke."
In any event, the best of the wines finish crisp and clean and bright, and even the less than spectacular bottles are pretty damn good. Our all-star panel of judges dutifully listen to Rowley's recitation of Hemingway's Moveable Feast:
As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.We power through four flights of wines and a couple dozen shigokus. Then we head downstairs for our reward: an ice-cold pale ale. Rowley promises to reveal the winning wines early next week.
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