Let’s suppose we all start eating more shellfish in the interest of saving Puget Sound. The question that arises immediately is, “What wine shall we drink with them?”

I picked up some shucked Kumomoto oysters and smoked oysters at the Taylor Shellfish retail store in Shelton and headed up to Hoodsport to get some advice. Peggy and Dick Patterson’s Hoodsport Winery was the 15th to open in this modern Walt-Clore,-Chas-Nagel,-et-al. era of Washington wine. (There are now 360 wineries in Washington.) Although they import grapes from eastern Washington for their red wines, they make white wines from more maritime varieties and excellent fruit wines. Peggy figures half their sales are fruit wines, and half grape.

Although you might hear that very crisp dry whites MUST be drunk with oysters, we decided we would start with no presumptions.

The Kumomotos had a slight sweetness, Dick noted, so we started with Sauvignon Blanc. Didn’t work. The flavors didn’t blend at all.

Next we tried the Madeleine Angevine. The grape originated in the Loire Valley in France and is quite similar to Riesling. According to Peggy, it’s being grown on Lopez, Whidbey, and Bainbridge islands and around Sequim.

The “mad angie” was great with the oysters, a really nice complement.

Meanwhile, Peggy, who is not really “an oyster person,” as in raw oysters, anyway, was nibbling at the smoked oysters and announced that the cranberry and raspberry wines go well with the smoked. Indeed they do!

“This is the one I’ve been waiting for,” said Dick, opening a bottle of rhubarb wine. He likes to sauté oysters, pour in a little rhubarb wine, cover and steam for a couple of minutes, then remove the cover and reduce the wine.

It turned out the rhubarb went well with the smoked oysters, but not that great with the raw. It had too much residual sugar to blend with the raw oysters, but the smokiness overcame the sugar.

The sweetness of the rhubarb wine set us up for our big surprise of the evening. Although we figured the fruit wines just weren’t going to work with the raw oysters, much to my disappointment, Dick and I tried the raspberry anyway.

Whoa! The combo was great.

“That’s amazing,” said Dick. “It’s about 3.5 percent residual sugar.” It shouldn’t have worked, but it did.

For some reason, the raspberry flavor carried it with the oysters. Very nice!

Now you carry out your own experiments with clams and geoducks.

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