Me and My Champagne Vacay in Istanbul

I bought a suitcase in Paris for exactly one passenger.

A suitcase for one

It was the end of a month-long jaunt around the world, and somewhere in Champagne, France, I bought a spendy little bottle of wine that I was quite excited to save. Not drink. Save. For something.

A bottle of champagne cannot ride in your carry-on (more on that below), so I scoured the streets of Paris for a cheap suitcase whose entire job was to get that bottle home to Vietnam. One bottle. One suitcase. A perfectly reasonable plan.

Two hours and change

My layover in Istanbul was three hours, and I had to recheck the suitcase, which meant getting it to the counter two hours before my flight home. I landed with two and a half hours to go. I got to the counter with over two hours to spare.

The kid behind the counter would not check it. He said it was at the two-hour mark.

So I went to the customer service counter, still with time to spare, and the woman there, also Turkish Airlines, came over to his counter. They got into a screaming match.

The screaming match took long enough that I no longer had two hours to check my luggage. So me and my champagne were rebooked, complimentary, on the next flight home to Vietnam. Which, unfortunately, was four days later.

The 3:00 a.m. call

Normally I am all for an impulsive layover. Ask anyone. But it had been weeks since I was home.

So at 3:00 a.m. Istanbul time, I called my husband. Jay took the nutty call with the patience of a man who has been married to me for a while. Even Jay knew this one was unintentional.

How a bottle of champagne flies

The whole mess traces back to a rule most of us follow without thinking about why.

The bottle can't sit with you. In August 2006, British police announced arrests in a plot to bring down transatlantic flights with liquid explosives disguised as drinks. Within months, Europe adopted the rule we all live with now: liquids in your carry-on only in containers of 100 ml or less, all inside one clear, resealable bag of no more than a liter. A 750 ml bottle of champagne fails that test by 650 ml. If you want it home, it goes in the hold. Hence the suitcase.

The bottle is already under more pressure than the plane will ever put on it. Champagne gets its bubbles from a second fermentation inside the sealed bottle. The carbon dioxide has nowhere to go, so it dissolves into the wine and pushes on the glass at roughly 5 to 6 bar, well over twice the pressure in a car tire. That is why champagne bottles are so much heavier than ordinary wine bottles, with a punt in the bottom and a wire cage over the cork: the glass is a pressure vessel.

The hold is not outer space. The baggage hold of a modern jet sits inside the same pressurized fuselage as the cabin. US certification rules require the cabin to be held at a pressure altitude of no more than 8,000 feet in normal operation, so at cruise your suitcase is breathing roughly the air of a mountain town, not the stratosphere. Going from sea level to 8,000 feet drops the pressure outside the bottle by about a quarter of a bar. For glass built to hold back five or six, that is a rounding error. It doesn't freeze down there either: an Air Canada captain writes that their Boeing 767 keeps its baggage hold above 7°C.

So the bottle was never in danger from the airplane. Its only real enemy was the counter.

Four days I did not plan

This was my first trip to Istanbul. I booked a hotel and wandered into the fish market, where I was offered "a good time" if I joined for some fish. I did not.

What I did do was walk. The Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia face each other across Sultanahmet, and on a bright April day there were kids kicking a ball on the grass in front of one and families posing at the fountain in front of the other. In the Grand Bazaar, everyone was still in masks.

In a carpet shop, a man unrolled a blue runner stitched with rows of little colored squares and held it up for me. I did not need a rug. I came home with a rug guy instead. He took photos of me around Istanbul, he is just a nice dude, and he still checks in every holiday to remind me he exists.

Down by the water, fishermen lined the rail of the Galata Bridge with their rods out over the Golden Horn, right above the fish restaurants on the lower level. Up the hill, rainbow-painted stairs climbed under a canopy of hanging wicker lanterns. Street carts sold roasted chestnuts split and charred on top, corn on the cob, and fresh juice from pyramids of oranges, grapefruit and halved pomegranates. And an ice cream man in a fez did the thing they do, offering a cone and snatching it back while his customer laughed and reached for it.

Four days is not enough for Istanbul. It was, however, exactly enough for me to stop being mad about it.

If you go

• Recheck time is the trap. If your connection means collecting and rechecking a bag, the clock that matters is the counter's cutoff, not your departure time, and the agent at the counter decides when that clock has run out. Turkish Airlines recommends arriving three hours ahead for international flights. On a connection with a recheck, treat every minute as spoken for.
• Check the visa rules for your passport. US citizens can currently visit Türkiye visa-free for up to 90 days in any 180-day period. Rules shift, so check Türkiye's official visa site before you go.
• Champagne in a checked bag is fine. Wrap it in clothes, put it in the middle of the bag away from the walls, and remember the risk is a dropped suitcase, not the altitude.
• Do not leave the bottle's fate to a counter. If you are carrying something you love, build in more time than you think you need.

Proof

I was saving that bottle for a special occasion. It made it home to Vietnam, and I shared it with my husband as proof of what had happened. The special occasion, it turns out, was four days in Istanbul.