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.

As the Times reports,

Designing a new bottle was no small feat. The container still had to withstand Champagne's extreme pressure. It would also need to survive the four-year obstacle course from the factory floor to the cellars to the dining table, and fit in existing machinery at all Champagne houses. And it had to be molded so that consumers would barely detect the difference in the bottle's classic shape.

I look forward to seeing the new bottles, even though nowadays I play it safe--no champagne with dates at parties. A nice screw-top bottle of Mad Dog 20-20 is much safer.