Everything you always wanted to know about champagne but were afraid to ask

[mandy]

In the latest dispatch from the frontiers of champagne science, researchers find that hollow cellulose fibers knocked off a cloth or paper towel used to dry a flute act as bubble-formation, or "nucleation," sites. As a result, glasses wiped with a towel show "an excess of effervescence,"...

On the champagne front, you can also maximize bubble production by leaving the flutes in the open air, right side up, so stray fibers from your guests' clothing waft into them (assuming you don't mind the yuck factor here). If you wash the flutes and air-dry them upside down, however, the paucity of fibers will damp the bubble production of even the priciest champagne unless the glassmaker has made microetches in the flute, as some masters have done for ages. Those scratches, too, act as nucleation sites.

If the conversation drags, you may want to observe the bubbles. These orbs of carbon dioxide exhibit "a curious and quite unexpected" behavior, Gerard Liger-Belair of the University of Reims and colleagues report in the food journal. The train of bubbles emitted from any point might be evenly spaced, then suddenly switch to producing pairs, triplets, quadruplets ... up to 12 bubbles at a time. The duration of a "bubbling regime," or pattern, can last from seconds to minutes...

full article: http://www.nwfdailynews.com/articleArchi...cience.php