Oyster Riot - Old Ebbitt Grill (DC - Downtown)

As always, the Old Ebbitt Oyster Riot kicked off the "eating season" (runs annually from Thanksgiving through New Year's) in style.

Where else in the World can you sample 23 different oysters paired with a dozen white wines under one roof? Mix in passed oyster hors d'oeuvers, bread & cheese stations, a "shrimp shack" (featuring stone crab claws and shrimp cocktail), Guinness on tap, the "hall of losers" (the hundreds of wines that were not selected as feature wines) and some gritty, live blues music and you have the makings of a really big party.

It is easy to understand why everyone - and I mean everyone - in DC stops by to partake in the fun. You will see Georgetown students in jeans and baseball hats, standing next to couples in black tie (presumably on their way to the Kennedy Center), while gaggles of 30-something cougars from Virginia-tucky mingle with roving groups of youngish, male, American-Psycho-looking lawyers.

Tickets for this event are pricey, at around $80 per person, but even at these prices the event sells out well in advance. In fact, this year I saw people scalping extra tickets outside the event.

People cue up for hours before the official 6:00 start time - crowding all three of the Ebbitt's bars. Eventually they make their way to the atrium to begin the three hour food orgy. After handing in your ticket, you get a wrist band, a wine glass, a plate (with a hole to hold your wine glass) and a map of where to find all the oysters and wines.

What ensues is typically 45 minutes of frenzied pushing and shoving as people try to sample as many different wines and oysters as possible. Their goal is to find their favorites and spend the remainder of the evening camped out next to them. Others of us take a more leisurely and holistic approach realizing that if one were to cover the entire event, sampling two of each oyster and a half glass of each wine, one would emerge three hours later having consumed nearly 50 oysters and at least six glasses of wine. Discretion is the better part of valor here - it is a marathon, not a sprint.

After the initial surge, people start to get tipsy, so they migrate over to the cheese tables for bread, cheese, nuts and anything else that isn't an oyster and might soak up some of the wine. Others begin to feel full and start looking for places to sit down and take a breather.

At about this point every year (about a third of the way through the night) people remember that there is a shrimp shack and there is a massive run on shrimp cocktail and stone crab claws.

After snacking on the shrimp and crab, participants are re-fortified and dash around the corner to begin sampling from the 100+ wines in the "hall of losers" while others make their way towards the Guinness taps (bad idea, really bad idea).

Finally, with everyone drunk, full and perhaps a bit "energized" from consuming so many oysters, the dance floor becomes a sea of uncoordinated bodies crashing into each other to the tune of a driving rhythm and blues sound track.

My tasting notes from this year's event are a crumpled, salt water smeared mess, so I can't be too specific, but I do have the following observations:

Passed hors d'oeuvers - These were bigger and better than I remember in past years. Over the course of the evening, I sampled fried oysters, oyster shooters, bacon wrapped oysters and the biggest crowd pleaser of them all, the "oyster slider." The latter was a small, round potato roll stuffed with fried oysters and cole slaw. The result was somewhere between an oyster po'boy and a White Castle hamburger.

Wines
- The Grand Champion (2004 Jackson Estate Sauvignon Blanc - Marlborough, New Zealand) was outstanding. Clean, crisp, grapefruit notes and a long finish - everything I like in a Sauvignon Blanc.

- The Second runner-up (2004 Santa Rita Reserva Sauvignon Blanc - Casablanca Valley, Chile) was a total bust. This was an example of the heavy, cat piss scented Sauvignon Blanc your Mother warned you about (OK, maybe she said "yew scented" but you all know what I mean).

- The biggest surprise of the night was one of the Gold Medal winners (2004 Adegas Galegas Gran Vinum "Esencia Diviña" Albariño - Rias Baixas, Spain). This was a light, energetic wine with an oily mouth feel and short, but tight finish. I think they converted a few people to Albariño that night.

- The worst wine of the night (yes, I feel compelled to point them out) was another one of the Gold Medal winners (2004 Linden Vineyards Seyval, Virginia). I give the organizers credit for trying to support the wine industry in our neighboring state of Virginia, but this was not a strong showing. Maybe I tasted a bad bottle (someone liked them enough to vote them into the Gold Medal category), but this was acrid, fruitless stuff that I poured out after the second taste.

Oysters - There were quite literally too many to remember. I sampled from VA to the Puget Sound, from oysters the size of my hand to oysters the size of my thumb and everything in between. The organizers do a fantastic job of arranging oysters in playful combinations. They will pit two identical oysters, grown in different water next to each other at one table while at another, there will be different oysters grown in the same water.

Finally, my hat is off to the army of Oyster shuckers that turn out for this event. Rumor has it that the Ebbitt shucks over 20,000 oysters each night - an alarming 7,000 oysters shucked per hour. Many of the local oystermen turn out for the event and their ranks are augmented by a large contingent from Baltimore's Lexington Market.