Perhaps above all, Barbe-Nicole and François soon learned that bottling wine—and especially the sparkling pink champagne that proved so popular—was a risky business. Breakage rates could be ruinous. In a hot summer, eighteenth-century vintners sometimes lost as much as 90 percent of their champagne stocks when the pressurized contents of the sparkling wine exploded. Unlucky vintners could awaken to discover their storerooms, filled with the wine on which they had staked their future, flooded with wine and broken glass.
