Blonde Girl With A Glass Of Champagne Strips A Pink Negligee On The Antique Chair

Champagne is usually served in a Champagne flute, whose characteristics include a long stem with a tall, narrow bowl, thin sides and an etched bottom. The Victorian coupe (according to legend, designed using a mold of the left breast (signifying a giving from the heart) of Marie Antoinette as a birthday present to her boyfriend the king) is not recommended as it disperses the nose and over-oxygenates the wine. Champagne is always served cold, its ideal drinking temperature at 7 to 9 °C (45 to 48 °F). Often the bottle is chilled in a bucket of ice and water before opening. Champagne buckets are made specifically for this purpose, and often have a larger volume than standard wine-cooling buckets (to accommodate the larger bottle, and more water and ice).
Opening Champagne bottles
Champagne has been an integral part of sports celebration since Moët et Chandon started offering their Champagne to the winners of Formula 1 Grand Prix events. At the 1967 24 Hours of Le Mans, winner Dan Gurney started the tradition of drivers spraying the crowd and each other. Instead of pushing the cork out, a Champagne bottle can be opened by holding the cork and rotating the bottle at an angle in order to ease out the stopper, a method that reduces the risk of spilling or spraying any Champagne, and that also stops the cork flying out of the bottle at speed.