Champagne's wine was made in the region since Roman times, but early Champenois wines were pale and thin, because the cold northern climate made grapes hard to ripen. The oldest recorded sparkling wine is Blanquette de Limoux, made by Benedictine monks in 1531 by bottling wine before fermentation finished. Christopher Merret presented a paper to the Royal Society in 1662 describing adding sugar to finished wine to trigger a second fermentation, the basis of the traditional method. English glassmakers had developed bottles strong enough to withstand the pressure, which French glassmakers could not yet match. Early bubbles were seen as a fault, and exploding bottles earned the wine the nickname the devil's wine.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.