Serving your Champagne

After having made sure that your wine has been properly stored, you can prepare yourself to taste it.

However, to taste it at its best, you need to abide by certain elementary rules:

• Bring the Champagne to its ideal drinking temperature (8 to 10 Celsius degrees). To bring to the right temperature, put it in the fridge for about 3 hours. Beware that it is best to put your bottles in the least cold part of your fridge and not leave them for weeks (it would break the wine). You can also use a Champagne bucket. Fill it with water and ice and insert the bottles in them for about 1/2 hour. Please make sure that you do NOT use a freezer. You would kill your wine in a matter of minutes. It would stop sparkling.

• You now have to choose your glasses... The ideal glasses are the "flutes" (see picture below). Please try to avoid the very wide or widening glasses. These glasses were in fashion. It is said there were shaped on the breast of a girlfriend (Madame de Maintenon) of the French King Louis XIV. These glasses are bad to taste ant sparkling wines are the bubbles instantly go away

• Now the crucial moment... opening the bottle: Hold your bottle with one hand and the muselet (metal thing holding the cork). Put your bottle at an angle and slowly turn the cork with your right hand (don't turn the bottle). Leave the gas evade gently.

• Serve a bit of Champagne in each "flute" before filling them at 2/3. The wine is then at best to liberate all its aromas...