Pop some bubbly and grab your glasses, it’s happy hour time! We’re not talking champagne wishes and caviar dreams though (although roe made its way onto the menu). Jeffrey Pressley of Birdie’s Biscuits thought it would be a great idea to bring together two of his favorite things: sparkling wine and biscuits. Ashley Costanzo of Vintage Imports was more than happy to pair up with Jeff and bring along five unique sparkling wines to complement his menu.

Jeffrey’s southern grandma, Birdie, produced a dough that yielded a flaky yet dense outcome because of the painstaking detail put into them. It serves as the base recipe for his business and has helped establish Birdie’s as one of Philly’s few places to enjoy a proper biscuit. Even better, the dough is versatile enough that it may be used in various applications, as Jeffrey used it throughout the night. Similarly, a lot goes into making a bottle of bubbly, and each culture has its own science that produces its own  delicious result. The Iberian Penisula has its Cava; Italy its Franciacorta; and of course, France has champagne, among other sparkling varieties. 

The first dish of the night was a savory biscuit. It incorporated parmesan, chives, caviar and crème fraîche. As they say, things that grow together, go together. While these aren’t necessarily grown, the idea remains the same. The accompanying wine was the Blanquette de Limoux from Pierre Tailleur de Vins. This Mauzac and Chenin Blanc blend from one of the world’s oldest regional producers of fizzy wines has a bouquet of white stone fruit that gives way to a crisp, fresh palate that helps cut through rich foods.

The following wine hailed from Catalonia. This Gran Reserva Cava from Frenchman Roger Goulart spends seven years in the bottle, giving us a robust, layered wine that you’d expect from a wine twice its price tag. Its ripe fruit and baked pastry profile played very well with the fisherman’s pie for the second course. Bringing together lobster, scallops, and smoked fish and finishing with apple sauce over a Birdie’s biscuit crust, the pie was a favorite amongst guests.

As mentioned before, we were going to see a few iterations of the dough throughout the night. In this case, dumplings were cut, blanched, then seared to give us a gnocchi-like component to Jeff’s third offering. It was as unexpected as being presented with a rosé from Germany’s Rheingau. Rud Sekt Ohlig’s “Latitude 50” combines Pinot Noir with 2 lesser-known varietals (Dornfelder and Portugeiser) to give us a dry, mineral-like sparkler that was a playful partner to the beets, cabbage and pumpkin in the finished plate.

Honestly, the last thing I would expect to pair with sparkling wine is down home fried chicken. Yet, here we were sipping a rosé from Bairrada (Portugal) with the same biscuit from the opening bite and golden brown chicken. The chicken, having been marinated with the same spices found in the breading, went through a double frying process to ensure the meat’s doneness and the crunchy exterior didn’t burn. The chicken had a rich supporting cast of chicken liver mousse, onion jam and bourbon maple, and Sidonio de Sousa’s 2015 edition of the wine helped cleanse the palate, ensuring each bite would be like taking the first. Bubbles can essentially exfoliate your tongue, taking away fatty, oily residue so that your next bite will be as fresh and delicious as the previous one. Eat, drink, repeat, basically.

For dessert, you can expect more complementary profiles for the food and wine and less contrast like some of the savory courses. Albino Rocca Moscato d’Asti presented underripe oranges and pears but possessed enough sweetness to hold up next to the pear cobbler and vanilla ice cream. This was also the final way to use the biscuit dough – as a crust, in this case.

Be sure to visit Jeffrey and his team at Birdie’s Biscuits location in Reading Terminal or at Cherry Street Pier. Tell him COOK sent you!