I once accidentally shot a girl I was trying to date in the head with a champagne cork. She was standing next to me as I opened the bottle; the cork slipped my grasp, shot straight up, hit the ceiling, and came down squarely atop her noggin. It all happened in a second and I didn't even realize what had happened--I basically opened the bottle, heard a pop and then she fell down, holding her head and going "Fuuuuuuck!" (Afterwards she was fine, though our budding romance was not.)
The amount of pressure inside a champagne bottle, in addition to being calibrated to destroy my relationships, is much greater than what's inside a bottle of beer. To prevent explosions, champagne bottles are made extra-thick and extra-heavy, nearly two pounds each. Multiply that by the 300 million bottles of Champagne that France ships every year and you've got a lot of carbon emissions. To combat this, the French are developing a new, slimmer-walled champagne bottle that weighs less.
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