Chicken Burgers If you’re switching the beef for chicken, make it Champagne. Blanc de blancs Champagne, or any kind of it all, so long as it’s not lying about its ori‑ gin story—it has to be from Champagne. You can trick your guests by serving a sneaky cava from Spain, a deceiving crèmant from France, or even a Canadian cool climate falsifier from Nova Scotia. But you can’t trick the palate, or the chicken burger. It likes what it likes. A crispy chicken burger and Champagne, es‑ pecially made with brioche… these are gastronomical twin flames. Every-Topping-Imaginable Burgers If you’re like me and you plough toppings onto your burger, you’ll be asking a lot out of your red wine. The trick here is to choose a wine with considerable depth, oodles of oak, and enough jammy fruit concentration that nothing could knock it down. You need a Mike Tyson wine. A wine so bold, so fruit-laden, so chock- full of glycerin, that it won’t budge in the face of relish or chutney. That’s why California reds are the quint‑ essential burger wine. Most of them are almost im‑ mortalized on the vine with their extra hang time. And most of these old vines have survived every plague known to the vitis vinifera species, all the way from earthquakes to the poisonous glassy-winged sharp‑ shooter to the boxing matches between winemakers (see: Sideways). If a Zinfandel or Petite Sirah won’t succumb to the complete shut-down of the wine trade during prohibition, surviving as ‘church wine’, then it won’t collapse in the face of Sriracha. For the ultimate burger producers, for the serious griller, drink Turley (a favorite of mine) or Ridge. If you’ve got zinfandel in the blend, slather your burgers with bar‑ becue sauce, squeeze out the last heaving breaths of ketchup, smash it with pickles, and dig out the Skippy Smooth. Go unhinged. This wine will smolder like the fires lapping at the grease while it slips between the grill.
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