Champagne terminology
In order to qualify as true champagne, the wine has to come from the Champagne region of France. Everything else, technically speaking, is just sparkling wine, although it may be very good sparkling wine.

There are different levels of dryness in champagne and sparkling wines, depending on the amount of sugar added at the end of the production process. They are labelled as follows:

Extra Brut: the very driest, with no added sugar.
Brut: very dry
Extra dry: dry to medium dry
Sec: getting sweeter...
Demi-sec: ...and sweeter
Doux: the sweetest. Often drunk as a dessert champagne.

A champagne may be either vintage or non-vintage. Vintage champagnes are produced in exceptionally good years, and so are less common and correspondingly more expensive. The wine is aged for three years before release, and the year is printed on the bottle. It will have a more complex and fuller flavour. Non-vintage champagne is made from a blend of grapes from different years. It may still be very good, and won't be so astronomically expensive.

Bottle sizes
Quarter bottle 20cl
Half bottle 37.5cl
Standard bottle 75cl
Magnum 150cl (equivalent to two bottles)
Jeroboam 3 litres (equivalent to four bottles)
Methuselah 6 litres (equivalent to eight bottles)
Salmanazar 9 litres (equivalent to twelve bottles)
Balthazar 12 litres (equivalent to sixteen bottles)
Nebuchadnezzar 15 litres (equivalent to twenty bottles)

Any bottle larger than a jeroboam should be drunk within a year of purchase.

Serving and storage
Champagne is best served at between 7-9ºC. You can achieve this by refrigerating the bottle for three or four hours, or plunging it into iced water for half an hour. Don’t put champagne bottles in a freezer to cool them down. It’s all too easy to leave them for too long and the consequences are too sad to contemplate.

Store champagne bottles on their sides somewhere cool, dark and dry. The best temperature is between 10-12ºC. Before you lay it down, tip the bottle neck down so that wine wets the cork and the air at the top moves to the centre of the bottle. This stops the cork from drying out.

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