|
By Morton Hochstein
A couple of decades ago, I participated in an event designed to pick the right wine to drink with oysters. I went to deepest Long Island to take part, because I would go anywhere for good oysters and I don’t remember which wine we thought best, maybe a New York State Riesling, maybe a Sauvignon Blanc, perhaps even a Muscadet, although that is putting a lot of acidic wine against briny oysters.
Jon Rowley, a former fisherman turned food consultant in Seattle, promoted this event and has been involved in hundreds more since our first meeting. And in a strange way, he was godfather to a tasting I enjoyed just recently, at the Oyster Bar in New York, designed to identify our choice of Sauvignon Blanc to serve with four types of seafood-- oysters, scallops, crab cakes and wild salmon.
Our host was Tom Meyer, partner in Sauvignon Republic, a unique marketer which sells only Sauvignon Blanc, selecting one representative wine from distinct growing areas. Obviously this event was primarily about the four Sauvignon Blancs from Meyer’s firm that we tasted, all 2007 vintage, representing Marlborough in New Zealand, Stellenbosch in South Africa, California’s Potter Valley {Mendocino} and one from the Russian River Valley.
Our seafood dishes were: Hama Hama oysters with cucumber crème fraîche and salmon caviar from Washington; a delightfully sweet gigantic sea scallop from Maine with sea urchin sauce perched on fried wonton skin; Maryland crab cakes and pan seared Yukon River wild red king salmon, beurre blanc, with goat cheese and a grilled asparagus.
The plan was that we would taste each of the wines against each of the dishes, meaning a minimum of sixteen tastes, not counting second tries. Forgive me, I could not keep the pace and just enjoyed myself after a few attempts to follow the regime. Potter Valley, the fattest of the wines, went well with the oysters, just a shade more tastefully than the other three. Who could complain? I also do not permit anything, no sauces no matter how wonderful, to come between me and oysters, so I shucked off chef Sandy Ingber’s crème fraîche and salmon caviar dots, enjoying my crustaceans au naturele. The sauce I tasted on its own and it was fine.
I followed the same policy with that gorgeously seared Maine Scallop and enjoyed the tiny sea urchin fragment separately. The Russian River Valley wine, far sweeter than the others because it is based on a unique clone, Sauvignon Musqué, was a perfect marriage of sweet scallop and lightly spicy wine.
Chef Enberg’s crab cakes were delightful little cannonballs lightly fried and packed with crab. I found no problems or no favorites when tried with each of the wines. That brings us to the salmon. This was a superb Wild Red King Salmon from the Yukon River and Enberg told it us it had been pulled out of the Yukon River the day before and air freighted to New York. I had had white King Salmon under similar circumstances a few years ago, and I have to rank the Red as superior. Rowley, it turns out, is the marketing man for Kwikpak, formed to help Alaskan Eskimo market their catch. It has not been a great season for wild salmon, so we were indeed fortunate to taste this complex, richly flavored fish. It sure makes the domestic, farm-raised variety look pale and simple.
Sauvignon Republic is an interesting concept and Meyer and his partners, all major players on the California wine scene, do a great job of identifying fine Sauvignon Blanc, whether from their own backyard as in Potter Valley or from oceans away, Marlborough in New Zealand or Stellenbosch in South Africa. They’ve also managed to keep the price right for their brands, usually $17 or $18 for a fine wine.
© July 2008 LuxuryWeb Magazine. All rights reserved.
|
