Every year just before Thanksgiving, the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington holds an “oyster riot”–an event featuring a live band, copious amounts of wine, and a limitless supply of oysters (at last year’s riot, 50,000 oysters were devoured in two days). Customers pay $115 a head and many dress up for the sold-out occasion. Needless to say, the right choice of wine to accompany the briny bivalves is crucial. Experts recommend a cold, crisp white with minerality and a clean finish–nothing too buttery or oaky. So prior to each riot, the restaurant conducts a wine and oyster pairing competition, in which 14 judges select the 10 wines that pair best with the oysters. This year, I was one of those judges.
Though thrilled to receive such an honor, I wondered if I was up to the task. The restaurant’s head of marketing assured me the only requirement is a love for oysters and wine. But what if, drawing on my oenological ignorance, I said something stupid? Or even worse, suppose my favorite wines turned out to be of the box or screw-top variety? The competition involves 20 numbered glasses and all the Olympia oysters you can handle. What happens if by glass 20 everything is a blur?
In Judgment of Paris, George M. Taber describes the moment when winemaker Warren Winiarski tasted a year-old Nathan Fay Cabernet Sauvignon: “The wine had a complex, layered structure that provided a progression of flavors as the wine moved across his taste buds. It didn’t pass through his mouth smoothly like silk. It was more like linen, with an extremely fine-grained texture of intertwined tastes that could be savored and enjoyed slowly. The aftertaste was excellent–long and lingering.” I’ve never even tasted linen.
But when I explained my plight to a few wine friends, they were nothing but encouraging. Lyn Farmer, a food and wine critic in Miami, told me not to sweat it: “Odds are, if you like it, they‘ll like it. Too many professionals are preoccupied with finding faults in wine instead of finding what’s enjoyable.” In the end, said Farmer, “trust your palate.” Pamela Busch, the proprietor and wine director of Cav Wine Bar and Kitchen in San Francisco, reminded me “that lighter wines that are tasted after bigger or more tannic wines will not show that well. Drink water in between to get the taste of the last wine out of your mouth. . . . Also, try not to judge based just on what you like but what you think is a well-made wine.”
So with all that in mind, I judged. In a private room in the Old Ebbitt’s basement, sitting around a long table covered in linen (no, I was not tempted to taste it), we judges kept mostly to ourselves lest we influence each other. The only sounds heard were the clinking of glasses, an occasional whisper, and wine being slurped–and sometimes spat into buckets. Then, one by one, the judges finalized their rankings and went back upstairs to a private reception. At one point I looked up and noticed there were just four of us left. One of the other three was a real judge: Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.
Justice Scalia took his job seriously. He would take a sip, close his eyes in deep concentration, then jot something down. He asked the highly attentive waiters to bring several more glasses of wines for further examination. Exhaling loudly, the justice broke the silence in the room and said, “This is a really tough decision.”
Eventually I ranked my top ten and joined the other judges to feast on shrimp, crabcakes, prime rib, and even more oysters. (The legendary gastronome Brillat-Savarin wrote that humans were capable of ingesting 144 oysters in a sitting. I stopped at 45.) After everyone’s scores were tallied and combined, the results were made public: My personal favorite was ranked an abysmal 13th. But other than that, I didn’t do too badly: The overall winner, a Saint Clair “Vicar’s Choice” Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough, New Zealand, was my sixth favorite. (Ultimately, 7 of our 10 came from New Zealand.) The second best was my fourth. And the overall least favorite was also toward the bottom of my list.
At the bar, I turned to Scalia and asked which wine he most enjoyed. “I don’t remember,” he replied. “My problem with wine is I always taste apples.” Fair enough. The justice then sat with a few of us at a table where we talked about the election, food, hunting, and just about everything else. At some point in the night the justice might have even told me who he thought was going to step down from the Supreme Court. But by then it was all a blur.
VICTORINO MATUS
