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The Science Behind the Bubbly
isabotage3 writes "Here is
everything you need to know about champagne in time for New Year's — From how to maximize your bubbles to why bubbles follow certain patterns and then suddenly change to when the time is right to stop studying your bubbly and drink up."
You should have told us an hour ago. :)
Over 10 C (50 F) at midnight in northern Germany, FWIW. Yeah I know, just one data point.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Australia is in GMT+10. Even GMT+11 in Sydney and in other weirdo Daylight Savings Pagan Worshipping States.
We could have been having the traditional Australian New Years Violence, Punch Ups, Bing Drinking and Arrests with even bubblier champagne. You're just too damned late man! You're just too damned late!
If you're reading this, you will be drinking champagne with another human being.
replace the word bubbly with "erection".
"Here is everything you need to know about champagne [CC] [MD] [GC] in time for New Year's -- From how to maximize your bubbles to why bubbles follow certain patterns and then suddenly change, to when the time is right to stop studying your bubbly and drink up."
Sorry. I'm the designated driver.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the size of the bubbles.
I recall reading somewhere that higher quality champagne has smaller bubbles
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Picked up a couple bottles of Veuve Clicquot for $33 each this morning...
That's my favorite appellation, but my wife likes the Demi-Sec
..........FULL STOP.
[...] to when the time is right to stop studying your bubbly and drink up.
s/drink up/pour the carbonated piss down the drain/g
Just saying, there are far better things to be drinking tonight. This is one tradition I personally would love to see dragged out and shot to celebrate the new year.
Picked up a couple bottles of Veuve Clicquot for $33 each this morning...
Yup. In that price range, I'll take that over Moet any time. The VC is a nice, crispy-dry champagne. Having it with some nice marinated, grilled quail and dove breasts served in endives - a most excellent finger-food configuration.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
...Wiki link about how "it's all really just sparkling wine unless it's from the Champagne region of France."
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me
Way to post this 14 minutes after New Year's, you insensitive clod! We British invented Time, you ought to bow to our will!
games journalism blog
Just in time for that New Years Champagne (er... "sparkling white", I'm not paying 4 times more for imported brand name stuff that tastes worse) and Mango Breakfast.
Woohoo! hic...
Sorry, must have been the Cham... er... sparkling white.
The US Senate never signed the Treaty of Versailles after WWI, which contained among other things the legal basis for naming wines. So as long as an American winery puts its location on the label, it can use champagne as a generic for sparkling wine.
I, on the other hand, am trying a sparkling rosé this year just to be different. So there!
good to see im not the only one browsing slashdot a new years eve. Happy new year fellow /.'ers :D
We British invented Time
You (and the Spanish) invaded countless sovereign nations around the world. Nations where people not only understood the concept of time (perhaps not down to the minute, or by "hours") but in some cases had been tracking celestial bodies for millenniums. And then you told them that they needed to keep time relative to some place they'd never heard of, using your methodology, calendar, etc.
Arrogance is the basic reason your country spent the last 300 years losing most of its "empire" :-)
Please help metamoderate.
To all the geeks who run their computers on UTC: It's one hour past midnight in your favorite timezone! Stop discussing bubble sizes...
Happy New Year.
As divers know, if you reduce the pressure, bubbles will form. An easy way to do this in a glass of champagne, or beer for that matter, is to toast with your good (or not so good) friend by touching the top of his glass with the bottom of yours.
The champagne in your glass with be compressed on impact, and no bubbles will form. The glass on the bottom will experience an explosive decompression in the liquid, and instantly foam up with little left to drink to the amusement of the whole party except for the unfortunate one.
This takes very little force if executed correctly: Both glass and liquid are quite stiff. An impact of 10cm/sec will easily cause a g-load of the bottom glass in the range -2g to -4g. This will of course result in negative pressure in the liquid, and bubbles will form instanty. The liquid will soon be back to normal pressure, and many of the bubbles cavitate, causing additional local pressure waves.
Happy New Year
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
The minute I saw "bubbly" and "science" I thought... hey, we've all seen the diet coke & mentos videos before, how bout adding some to a bottle of champagne? Alas it's already been done, a quick google/youtube search and it's there. Doesn't stop it from being a good idea though :D
The article talks about ways to make the bubbles form in the champagne. Why would you want to do this? Once a bubble forms, it eventually comes to the surface and is forever lost. Once all the gas has formed bubbles and escaped, the champagne is completely flat. So don't you want bubbles to NOT form? The only explanation I can think of is that if you're drinking it WHILE the bubbles are forming, it tastes better. But that doesn't really make sense to me. I mean, if I take a pristinely clean champagne flute and very carefully pour the champagne in and end up with a glass of champagne from which very little gas has been lost and in which very few bubbles are forming, I can't imagine taking a sip and thinking, "Hmm, not enough bubbles." If nothing else, the champagne is necessarily going to be doing some fizzing as it gets moved around my mouth and throat.
Bah! I'd rather just fart into my glass of champagne to increase the number of bubbles... bring on the beans and tacos...
You just have to say that the British and Spanish have had their empires, and learned a bit from it...unlike the US.
;)
Yup, that's probably flamebait!
Probably better to see it in a slightly lighter-hearted manner, particularly as us Brits haven't learned the lesson that well
I guess some lessons take longer to learn than others.
I ask myself: Do I even care?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
59 F right now in north georgia, 10 PM. The bugs have been out,and we have dandelions blooming in the lawn and we have daffodils coming up!
Usually when this happens we get nailed hard later on in the season. It will most likely hurt the fruit crop (apples and peaches) some as well.
They just suffered thru a damned war and one of the items to that needed to be in the damned treaty was wine naming? Jesus.
My first thought on reading the parent post was not about champagne, but that, while writing up a treaty to end a fucking war, politicians, and no doubt, lobbyists, had to add language for business considerations...
Sadly, it appears to be true. Several sites confirm it.
Given the history here, I am glad the USA didn't sign the treaty. Now Joe-SixPack can buy American "champagne", even if it isn't Champagne.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
To keep on a theme, that sparkling rosé that gave its life to make me happy tonight came from Alsace. Now, the bottle is marked as a product of France. So, can we conclude that the Alsace always belonged to France?
Of course, the answer is no. It's been traded back and forth between France and the Holy Roman Empire/Germany multiple time; with the occasional change of name to Elsass-Lothringen. At the time in question, it had ended up with Germany after the Franco-Prussian War; it then became French territory again with the Treaty of Versailles.
So, you see, the handling of territory was an important part of the treaty. The labeling of wines is merely a byproduct.
Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday January 01, @12:14PM
from the happy-new-years dept.
such as "How to get a girl to drink it with you?!" or "how to kiss a girl on NYE and NOT get slapped?!"
Libertas in infinitum
A point that is often lost on people is that Champagne (as it can only be called when originating from the Champagne region of France) is just a "sparkling wine", and sparkling wine is produced by many countries... it's called Cava in Spain, Sekt in Germany, and sparkling wine in USA.
And really you can find excellent quality sparkling wines that are not called 'champagne'. The term Champagne is kind of like a trademark, and France fiercely defends the name.
But you can buy quality sparkling wines made in many different places in the world
This reminds me of the classic question posed by a researcher at Stanford: why do the bubbles in a pint of Guinness sink? http://www.stanford.edu/group/Zarelab/guinness/ind ex.html
There are two methods- Charmat and French- and while Charmat is easier (Kegging beer equipment- use a CO2 wand and seal wine off) it doesn't produce the same flavours as the French method.
Bottle fermented sparkling wines are more difficult to make- riddling (removal of the yeast) takes the longest time when done by hand. New methods can perform complete riddling in less than 2 days, whereas done by hand might take 2 months or more.
We just disgorged and opened a bottle of 1993 Seyval Blanc champagne that had been sitting on the yeast for these 13 years. I froze the neck, shot the ice plug out (fun!) and topped it off with the 2006 Riesling I am currently producing.
At my friends 'champagne tasting' party it received the highest mark- a score of 9- "Liquid Panty Remover". While she was cute, I think I'll like her better with them on...
Making your own wine/beer is an extremely fun hobby and definately worth it from the geek-ness standpoint. There's so many different things to try and a nice, rigid experimentative mindset is a boon to this unpredictable biological curiosity.