Think of it as a mollusk dating service. The goal of the annual Pacific Coast Oyster Wine Competition is to find the West Coast wines best suited to hook up with an iced kumamoto or olympia as it slithers down a diner's throat. The ideal wine, says Jon Rowley, who dreamed up the PCOWC in 1990 and has been wrangling and instructing judges ever since, will "exalt" the oyster. Could there be a more noble matchmaking endeavor?

Rowley was a restaurant consultant in the 1980s, a career that included what he calls "a nice niche putting together oyster programs and bars around the country." When asked for advice on what wine to drink with the oysters,  "I'd find myself recommending French wines," Rowley says. "The French know about that sort of thing." But he got to thinking: With the West Coast wine scene booming, surely there must be American alternatives that would do a bivalve proud.

He turned his search into the inaugural PCOWC, held in Santa Monica, Calif. It was not a success. The judges included Russ Parsons from the Los Angeles Times; Ruth Reichl, who was the Times restaurant critic; the late Tom Stockley, a wine writer from the Seattle Times; and the late Michael Roberts, then chef of a restaurant called Trumps. "We met at Ocean Avenue Seafood," Rowley remembers, "and everyone brought three wines. They weren't very good."  The team, valiant sorts, vowed to eat more oysters and drink more wine until they got it right.  Rowley solicited better bottles from West Coast wineries, charging a $35 entry fee. He broadened the reach, holding tastings in New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston as well as San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle. The competitions were a hit, but Rowley was losing his shirt -- the entry fees didn't even cover his travel costs. He pulled the plug on the PCOWC.

After a three- or four-year hiatus (this is not the sort of operation that wastes valuable time on record books), demand for the resumption of the competition persuaded Rowley to up the wineries' ante to $100. The esteemed PCOWC  has been back in business since.

Earlier this spring five Seattle judges winnowed 119 submitted wines to 20 semifinalists, downing 1,200 kumamotos in the process. (A judge has to do what a judge has to do.) They looked for crisp whites with a clean finish, genteel wines that wouldn't get into fisticuffs with the oysters' brininess or power slam the delicate sweetness of their spineless suitors. The judges emerged with a collection of sauvignon and chenin blancs, pinots gris and grigio, and a few signature blends, all of which showed potential for oyster dating.

A few weeks ago Rowley, who handles the marketing for Taylor Shellfish Farms, the sponsors of the PCOWC, met up with his L.A. judges at the Water Grill for the 17th annual competition.  The panel included Parsons, now the Los Angeles Times food editor, Mary Sue Milliken of the Border Grill; Lou Amdur, of L.A.'s beloved winecentric restaurant, Lou's; the L.A. Weekly's Pulitzer Prize-winning Jonathan Gold, Zester Daily contributor Patrick Comiskey and myself, among others. We took our places at separate tables, each with an iced platter of a dozen kumamotos set before 20 sparkling Reidel glasses tagged with letter-bearing stickers: A, B, C, etc. A  scoring sheet, pencil and sobering slices of bread completed the setting.

Rowley started the proceedings with a final reminder to look not for the best wine, but for the best oyster wine -- a distinct category. Then, as PCOWC tradition requires, he read a quote from Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast," the passage that long ago spurred Rowley's love of oysters. "I closed up the story in my notebook and put it in my inside pocket," the quote begins, “and I asked the waiter for a dozen of the Portugaises and a half carafe of the dry white wine they had there."

As Rowley finished, Water Grill staff began pouring the first flight of wines from bottles swaddled in silver cellophane. For the next hour or so we exercised our best alchemical judgment in matching mollusk and minerality, vine and brine, notes of land and sea. Some judges judiciously used their spittoon, others of us couldn't get a wine's true measure until it ran by our tonsils. Some chewed and sipped thoughtfully, others instinctively. Some worked through the rows methodically, others zigzagged, retasting D to compare it to M, sipping S yet again to be sure. One judge was moved to perform intermittent chest-opening exercises, perhaps an indication of the stamina and fortitude required by the event, or maybe just a reaction to the onslaught of B-12.

We took notes, ranked and re-ranked until we each settled on our top 10 oyster wines. Our lists would eventually be combined with those from the Seattle and San Francisco tastings to calculate the PCOWC 2011 Wine Winners but at that moment, we had a quiet interlude of judging satisfaction. We hadn't just tasted 20 crisp white wines and eaten oysters to our hearts' content for personal gain or glory. We did it because it had to be done: What is a world in which oysters aren't properly exalted, in which unsuitable wines rob them of their superlative bestness? We do this, selflessly, for oyster lovers everywhere, to steer them to the often unsung and eminently affordable whites (most under $20) that will make their raw bar visits that much more joyous.

As the waitstaff took up the glasses, we gathered with Rowley in the Water Grill’s bar to cleanse our weary palates — hefty glasses of ale all around. It’s likely nobody felt the relief of the competition’s close as much as the aptly named Abel, the restaurant’s premier shucker. He’d cut his way through more than 300 oysters in the name of invertebrate blind dating.

Margot Dougherty, the food editor for Los Angeles magazine for many years, is a freelance writer and Zester contributing editor living in Venice, California. Her work has appeared in Saveur, More, Town & Country and Conde Nast Traveler among other magazines.

Photo: Oysters on the half shell with a perfect white. Credit: Jon Rowley

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