Tiny Bubbles

In those long hours before midnight, when everyone's starting to droop, you can pull out this interesting factoid and get the conversation humming again. That famed old Benedictine monk Dom Pierre Pérignon did not invent champagne, and his colorful quote about drinking the stars may have been nothing more than a clever marketing tool by one Dom Groussard, who was the monastery's cellar master two centuries later. In fact, it seems pretty certain that much, if not most, of the credit for the bubbly libation belongs not to the French at all, but to the English: http://www.francetoday.com/articles/2013/03/14/dom_perignon_a_look_at_a_legend.html