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.

Types of champagne
Champagne is made from a blend of three different grapes: Pinot Noir (for richness), Pinot Meunier (for fruitiness and spice) and Chardonnay (for delicacy, freshness and aroma). The two Pinot grapes are black grapes; Chardonnay is a white grape. The different styles of champagne are as follows:

Non vintage (NV) Made from a blend of more than one year’s harvest.
Vintage Made from a single good year’s grape harvest.
Blancs de Blancs Made from Chardonnay grapes alone.
Blancs de Noirs Made from black grapes only, either Pinot Noir or Pinot Meunier or both.
Prestige Cuvees Special, high quality champagne made from best quality grapes, and/or using superior production methods.

There are different levels of dryness in champagne, as follows:

Extra Brut: the driest, with no added sugar.
Brut: very dry to dry
Extra dry: dry to medium dry
Sec: slightly sweet
Demi-sec: medium sweet to sweet
Doux: very sweet, and often drunk as a dessert champagne.

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