Restore Champagne Carbonation With A Raisin

7 responses to “Restore Champagne Carbonation With A Raisin”

1. 

   Tunblor

   May 21, 2012

   …making the champagne even more flat. People don’t drink champagne for the *appearance* of bubbles, and even if they did, I’m sure they would rather less bubbles than what appears to be a small amount of bubbling faeces in their drink. This article makes Zero sense.

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2. 

   Lauren

   May 21, 2012

   Or you could put a spoon in the top of the bottle – preferably a tiramisu spoon (long handle). Not sure why this helps, but it seems to maintain sparkles for about 24 hours.

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   1. 

      Tunblor

      May 21, 2012

      From New Scientist:

      “Q.Champagne will keep its fizz if a spoon is suspended in the neck of the bottle as long as the spoon does not touch the liquid. Why is this?
      A. Variants of this question have been sent in many times over the years but we have never published them because the idea that a spoon (or, as sometimes suggested, a silver spoon) could stop champagne from going flat just did not seem sensible.

      But not wishing to seem narrow-minded, we tried a quick test one day. To our astonishment, we found that a half-full bottle of champagne left in the office fridge with a teaspoon slipped into its neck easily kept its fizz for 12 hours and was still sparkling after 24 hours.

      Had we discovered a new principle of physics? Sadly not. All we had discovered was the old principle of how easy it is to be misled by uncontrolled experiments. When we repeated the experiment more carefully, asking people to blind taste champagne which had been opened and stored either with or without a suspended spoon and rate the fizz against freshly opened champagne on a scale of 0 to 100, the spoon was found to have no effect at all. An opened bottle of champagne just keeps much longer than most people think it will. As the graph shows, both opened bottles decreased in fizz at exactly the same rate and were not rated as totally flat until approximately 96 hours after opening! As few people will regularly have two bottles of champagne open at the same time, if you have stored yours with a suspended spoon, you’ll probably attribute its unexpected longevity to the spoon.

      It’s not uncommon to attach significance to apparently linked events when they are rare and there is no control data. Every day, you’ll hear people say: “How amazing, I was just thinking of you and then the phone rang and it was you…” Although we’d all like to be telepathically connected to our friends, what you never remember, of course, is the number of times the phone did not ring.”

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   2. 

      Shep

      May 21, 2012

      That doesn’t work at all, even mythbusters did it…

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3. 

   John

   May 21, 2012

   I hate to pop the authors bubble… But Champagne isn’t carbonated.

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   1. 

      Dougal

      May 22, 2012

      Technically, Champagne (or sparkling wine here in Oz) has no added CO2, but the fermentation process makes the same CO2 that would be injected if it were to be carbonated.

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      1. 

         Dougal

         May 22, 2012

         Technically, that raisin also needs to be put back from whence it came!!

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