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Champagne Facts and Trivia - Become Bubbles Savvy!
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Greetings Champagne Lovers! Welcome to cupidflowershop.com's Champagne trivia and interesting facts page.
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Everything you Never Needed to Know About Champagne!
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Interesting Champagne Facts and Trivia
Contrary to popular belief, a bottle of bubbly (Champagne) should never pop with a big bang, but with a soft sigh. Popping open a bottle is garish, and extremely un-classy! Champagne should be served in flute or tulip style glasses, with long stems. This is so your hands don't warm the drink. Such glasses enhance the aroma and the flow of the bubbles.
The temperature of the Champagne should ideally be between 6 to 8 degrees C. this is best achieved by refrigerating your bottle for about three and a half hours before serving. Or, you could also place it in an ice bucket filled with ice, for about half an hour.
Vintage Champagnes are those which are aged for a minimum of three years upto ten years, and are the most expensive. Non-vintage Champagnes are aged for at least 18 months in France.
Champagnes are synonymous with toasts, and a beautiful lady was acknowledged by everyone toasting to her and clanging their glasses. This is why she was known as the toast of the town, in the 1800s.
Did you know:
That Champagne is a type of sparkling wine which is only grown in the French region of Champagne? America has its own version of Champagne as well, because of a loophole in the patent. However, American brands must mention the region they were produced in, on the bottle label.
That there are 49 million bubbles in a regular bottle of Champagne? Large bubbles are considered extremely unsightly and are not the mark of good quality Champagne. The tinier the bubble the better.
That Marilyn Monroe once filled up her tub with 350 bottles of Champagne, and took a long, luxurious bath in it? It was said that she drank and breathed Champagne as if it were oxygen.
That a Nebuchadnezzar represents the largest quantity of a Champagne serving? One Nebuchadnezzar is equal to 20 bottles! A Magnum is equal to only two bottles while a Split equals one-forth of a bottle.
That the pressure in a bottle of Champagne is equivalent to the tyre pressure of a double decker bus in Bombay? Chilling the bottle helps reduce the pressure tremendously.
What should you have with Champagne?
Caviar , Strawberries , Chocolate , Pate , and Gravlax (all of the finest quality of course)
Some of the best brands of Champagne include:
Veuve, Clicquot , Moet & Chandon , Bollinger , Pommery , Ruinart , Perrier Jouet , Lanson , Louis Roeerer ,
Billecart Salmon , and Taittinger
Legendary quotes on Champagne:
Famous Champagne quotes: "Remember gentlemen, it's not just France we are fighting for, it's Champagne!"
- Winston Churchill, in the midst of World War I.
"I drink Champagne when I'm happy and when I'm sad. Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I'm not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it - unless I'm thirsty."
- Madam Lilly Bollinger, of the Bollinger brand of Champagnes.
"I drink Champagne when I win, to celebrate . . . and I drink Champagne when I lose, to console myself."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Lord Keynes famous last words: "I wish I had drunk more Champagne."
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Stuff you really Don't need to know about Champagne!
La Champagne, the region, as distinct from its vinous product, le champagne, is situated roughly a hundred miles east and slightly north of Paris, covering the eastern portion of the Bassin Parisien. In the Middle Ages a political province of France, the viticultural region of Champagne is today centered in the department of the Marne, with considerable acreage extending into the Aube, the Aisne, and the Seine-et-Marne, four of the eight departments into which the original province of Champagne was divided following the French Revolution. Of the 250 villages under the Champagne appellation, 155 are located in the Marne, and yield 80 percent of the total champenois production. Of the 86,400 potential acres in the region, approximately 72,200 are planted in vineyards divided among 18,500 growers, who control approximately 88 percent of the acreage, and 110 producing houses, which own the other 12 percent.
Champagne, France is a region of timeless natural beauty whose verdant countryside was known as "Campania," from the Latin, "campus," meaning "field," at the time of Christ; the old French became "Champaign," and later, Champagne. It is generally accepted that the Romans introduced viticulture in the Marne, documented by Pliny as early as 79 A.D., but fossil evidence exists that wild vines flourished naturally in the area around Epernay over a million years ago. Beyond the development of vineyards and winemaking, however, the Romans also quarried the chalky hillsides outside Reims to construct their buildings and highways, leaving behind miles of "crayeres," or chalk caves, some as much as three hundred feet deep, which have since sheltered millions of bottles of champagne. By decree of the Emperor Domitian, in 92 A.D., most of the vineyards of France were uprooted to eliminate competition with the wines of the Italian peninsula, and the vines of Champagne were no exception. For two centuries the vineyards were cultivated secretly, until the Emperor Probus rescinded the decree and the vineyards were replanted. The wines of Champagne were established early among Europe's most sought-after.
As Christianity, and the influence of the church spread, considerable vineyard holdings were bequeathed to the monastic orders. These were significantly increased in the 11th century, when the nobility leaving for the Crusades, many of whom never returned, entrusted their properties to the care of the church; the vineyards of Champagne, whose wines were the only ones considered worthy of religious or royal offerings, were virtually nationalized in clerical hands. For centuries thereafter, the wines of sacrament, of coronation, of the court and of the consecration of treaties were those of Champagne.
Until the latter half of the 17th century, the still wines of Champagne were rivalled only by those of Burgundy, to which they were similar by virtue of their common vine varieties. Throughout the l600s, a paper-and-ink war, genteel in form if not in substance and written in Latin prose and verse, was waged between Champagne and Burgundy. The issues centered on the respective deliciousness, healthfulness, and natural wholesomeness of the wines. The Champenois had begun to encroach on the export markets of the Netherlands where Burgundy had been formerly unchallenged; perceiving opportunities to widen both their domestic and export markets, the Champenois spared no expense to improve the quality of their wines. In a true spirit of enterprise, the Champenois sought not to imitate the wines of Burgundy but to establish their own style. Voltaire remarked that these wines were delicious, unique, and enjoyed advantage for their novelty in the wealthy circles of Paris as well as in the export markets.
Reference
is made from the middle of the century on to wines of Champagne of various colors: "oeil de perdrix" (partridge eye); "couleur de miel" (honey-colored); "cerise" (cherry pink); "fauve" (tawny); or "gris" (gray). Pale wines vinified from black Pinot grapes were to become extremely fashionable. Although still red wines of Champagne were long well-known in England, varieties of vin gris were only introduced there in the early 1660s. Saint-Evremond, a courtier to Louis XIV, fell out of royal favor and fled to London, where he quickly reestablished himself in British polite society as an arbiter of fashion.
Saint-Evremond loved the wines of Champagne, and by writing to his friends in France, he managed to procure modest shipments, which instantly became popular. It is during this period that the first accounts of sparkling wines from Champagne appear. It is evident that these early sparkling wines were the result of accident. Most of the wines which remained in France were drunk young; when shipped abroad in cask, warm spring weather frequently set off a secondary fermentation, still underway when the wines arrived at their destination. Through trade with Spain and Portugal, the cork stopper was already in common use in England, mostly for ales, an advantage not yet available to the landlocked provinces of France. These delicate young wines were bottled immediately upon arrival, and retained, in more or less haphazard fashion, a lively sparkle for which they became much sought- after.
The phenomenon aroused considerable academic as well as commercial interest on the part of the Champenois. Rather than there having been a "discoverer" of champagne, it is perhaps more likely that the first successful, deliberate methods of capturing the sparkle in the bottle were due to the combined efforts of the monastic orders of Pierry and Epernay. Under the inspired direction of their respective cellarmasters, Frere Jean Oudart (1654-1742) and Dom Pierre Perignon (1639-1715), the abbeys of Saint-Pierre aux Monts de Chalons and Saint-Pierre d'Hautvillers became the point of origin of naturally sparkling wine in its purest form. The two abbeys were located barely two miles apart, and it can be taken for granted that these two gifted contemporaries on occasion consulted each other. What is more certain is that the inquiries and innovations they pursued during the last quarter of the 17th century remain among the most important and fundamental principles in the production of champagne: first, the technique of blending from various vineyards to obtain a finished wine superior to any of its parts; second, the process of clarifying sediment from wine; and third, the introduction of the cork in Champagne to replace hemp-wrapped wooden stoppers.
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