There is an
Old Wives' Tale that an opened bottle of
champagne ( or indeed any
sparkling wine ) can be made to hold its
fizz longer if it is placed in the
refrigerator with a spoon balanced on it so that the handle of the
spoon extends down into the
neck of the bottle.
Despite this fairly obviously being
utter rubbish this is a remarkably persistent
urban fable and having tired of voicing my
skepticism in the face of
pouty belligerence from people who insist that it must be true because their
mother used to do it and who apparently havent realised as most people do at about age 5 that
sometimes parents can be wrong, I have decided to settle the question once and for all....
February 27, 2003 02:20 PM
Purchased from
Elsternwick Liquor Express 3 bottles of
MichinBury White Seal 'Private
Cuvee' at AU$6.99 each
February 27, 2003 03:00 PM
Opened two of the bottles within 10 seconds of each other.
Poured out exactly 1 glass from each.
Placed a
spoon as described above on
one of the bottles.
Placed bottles ( including the unopened '
control' bottle ) into the fridge door.
Sampled poured glasses... Terrible.
February 28, 2003 08:00 PM
Opened remaining bottle.
Poured a glass from each bottle and randomly marked glasses 'A','B' & 'C'
Called in
flatmate and asked her to rate glasses in order of
fizziness.
Repeated for other 2
flatmates.
RESULTS
Not surprisingly all the subjects identified the newly opened bottle as the fizziest. This was just a
control to ensure that a detectable loss of fizziness had occurred in the other bottles.
Each subject said the other two glasses were very similar, but
surprisingly when pressed to choose, all three chose the glass that had been filled from the
bottle with the spoon as the fizzier of the two.
CONCLUSION
The results seem to indicate a very
slight but nevertheless
detectable effect.
The results may have been affected by the position of the bottles in the fridge door - the
non-spoon bottle was placed further from the hinge and thus may have been
shaken slightly more each time the door was opened and shut. I had meant to rotate the position of the bottles regularly but I was just to damn
lazy.
More experimentation is needed to confirm this result, however these particular results seem to support the thesis.
pouty belligerence has been replaced by
gleeful indignation