When I studied abroad and lived with a house mother in Florence, Italy, she left a silver spoon in the neck of a bottle of spumante. My house mother wasn’t much of a drinker, so we each had just a drop of wine whenever we had it, and even then, it was only on “special” occasions and Sundays. I’m pretty sure that in between those times that we opened the wine she kept it sealed with a silver stopper. But while it was open on the table, she kept a small silver teaspoon just dangling in the neck. It didn’t touch the wine at all (which wasn’t clear to me in the article–did Cecil actually put the chain IN the champagne, or just hanging from the neck?). From as far as I could tell, the wine never went flat. I don’t know if this can really be chalked up to the spoon, the stopper, or any other unmentioned factor, but my house mother swore by the spoon!
Cecil put the chain -in- the champage, in accordance with the question asked. Obviously, adding nucleation sites to a carbonated beverage isn’t a great way to keep the carbonation.
Sealing a bottle of champagne/spumante/sekt won’t perfectly keep the wine from going flat, but if your house mother wasn’t rolling the resealed bottle around, it wasn’t going to lose much more fizz than most sparkling wines lose between the first and last glass out of a bottle consumed in a normal evening.
I’m using the spoon trick regularly on champagne. However, my protocol differs from what Cecil describes in that:
the spoon does not have to be silver
it does not touch the champagne
Since I did not measure the efficiency of this method (nice trick with the condoms, Cecil), I can not claim that it works. My subjective impression is that it does. Champagne is definitively ok on the next day, and can even be drunk on the day after.
Subjective observations can not definitively answer the question of wether or not the method work. I would suggest replicating the condom measurements, with control, with an ordinary spoon that would not touch the champagne.
Btw, where on earth did Cecil find two bottles at a price of two for $5 ? Whatever she bought cannot have anything to do with real Champagne. I seem to remember that US people use the name “champagne” for anything that is yellow and contains bubbles. What a shame ! Champagne is produced in Reims, 150 km East from Paris. Anything else is NOT Champagne ! No wonder that your experiment did not work.
First off, the column was published in 1993. Five bucks then was worth a lot more than it is now. Second, champagne is a general term for sparkling wine in normal parlance, no matter what the origin of the bubbly might be. Third, do you think the soil the grapes were grown in would affect the physical properties of a carbonated wine?
Of course not, that what a joke. The spoon method should work with any sparkling wine, like sekt, cava, prosecco or anything similar that you produce on your side of the Atlantic.
(*) If we (French people) cannot even be arrogant about Champagne, what have we left ?
Also, it is common for Americans to mistakenly call any sparkling wine “Champagne.” I realize that Champagne is kind of like a name brand for sparkling wines made in a particular region of France. Just like Teqiula can only be made in a particular region in Mexico, although there are other liquors made with the same ingredient (Agave) that is grown and produced in a different region. Those liquors have different names (like Sotol).
So when someone calls a non-French sparkling wine a Champagne, it’s kind of like calling a non-branded facial tissue a Kleenex, or a non-branded photocopy a Xerox, or a non-branded soft drink a Coke. But when people order Coke in a restaurant that serves Pepsi, the waiter will always tell them it’s Pepsi and not Coke. (How disappointed would a customer be to receive Pepsi when they hate Pepsi, for instance?) What would happen if someone ordered Champagne and the waiter brought them sparkling wine, instead? Would it be like the Coke/Pepsi incident?
I learned this trick watching Graham Kerr on The Galloping Gourmet many many years ago, and he was pretty clear about this detail: it’s not supposed to be silver. (Sounds classy, I guess, bit that’s not really the point.) You use a stainless spoon, which most of us are more likely to have in our “silverware” drawers than real silver anyway.
During the course of a party, most bottles don’t have time to go flat, of course, but that last bottle of the night can go into the fridge quite nicely with an ordinary stainless teaspoon suspended in the neck. It should not touch the champagne itself. It works like a charm. No one (so far as I can tell) knows why. It just works.
My apologies. If I’d known you were French, I wouldn’t have responded at all. Let’s make up, I’ll send you a bottle of California’s finest sparkly, and you send me a bottle of true Champage, deal?
I must protest…why on Earth would anyone have LEFTOVER Champagne? On New Years Eve less? tsk, tsk. Would that all problems were so easily solved.:rolleyes:
This is the kind of statement that keeps Cecil going. Have there been any tests or is this a ‘we always do it this way don’t try to tell us were wrong’ kind of deal?
Without a cite of a real study, I will call anyone’s ‘personal experience of someone that told me’ nothing but wishful thinking.
And I cannot believe Graham Kerr–that one, not the post-AA, macrobiotic one–would leave a partially-finished bottle of ANYTHING anywhere but in his stomach.
Here in France, everyone uses the spoon (not necessarily silver) in the bottle trick. Several years ago a serious study WAS conducted by the consumers’ union UFC, Union Fédérale des Consommateurs, to test the claims of various manufacturers of stoppers meant to keep the sparkle in the bubbly, as well as the traditional spoon in the bottle. I don’t remember the protocols, but they certainly did a lab test - as they do with all products tested - plus probably a tasting bout with connoisseurs, possibly including professional wine tasters.
The spoon won hands down! The scientists didn’t know WHY it works, but they definitely showed that it DOES work. They advised consumers not to buy silly, expensive & useless gadgets & just stick a spoon in the bottle. Not touching the liquid, of course, which ought to be too low anyway.
I searched quickly, couldn’t found a link to this test, but I noticed a post on some forum where someone asserted the exact contrary : that the UFC had concluded that a spoon didn’t have any effect.
