A Toast to Me!

Did you know?

• The lip of a red wine glass is sloped inward to capture the aromas of the wine and deliver them to your nose.
• In King Tut’s Egypt (around 1300 BC), the commoners drank beer and the upper class drank wine.
• Cork was developed as a bottle closure in the late 17th century. It was only after this that bottles were lain down for aging, and the bottle shapes slowly changed from short and bulbous to tall and slender.
• When Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii in volcanic lava in A.D. 79, it also buried more than 200 wine bars.
• There are 49 million bubbles in a 750ml bottle of champagne, give or take a few, as calculated by scientist Bill Lembeck, based on 5.5 atmospheres of pressure, when stored at 20 degrees Celsius.
• The pressure in a bottle of champagne is 90 pounds per square inch, about three times that in an automobile tire.
• Legend has it that the champagne “coupe” (a shallow, broad-rimmed goblet) was modeled in the shape of Marie Antoinette’s breast, using wax moulds.
• The longest champagne cork flight in the world was 177 feet, 9 inches, set by American Heinrich Medicus in New York in 1988.
• A champagne cork leaves the bottle at a velocity of approximately 38-40 mph, but can pop out at as fast as 100 mph.
• The average number of grapes it takes to produce a bottle of wine: 600.
• The corkscrew was invented in 1860.