I hesitate to question The Master’s wisdom, but I believe there was a flaw in the experiment to determine whether a silver spoon stuck in the neck of a champagne bottle prevents the fizz from going flat. (I would really appreciate it if someone more knowledgable than I, which has to be pretty much everyone else on the Board, could post the link to the column in question. Thanks!)
The problem that I see is that I believe that a spoon pretty much acts as a stopper when the bowl covers the bottle top. Silver itself doesn’t have any particular properties to stop the bubbles from popping; thus, the silver necklace used proved to be worse than nothing.
Unca Cece did say that none of his spoons would fit into the top, but I’ve done this myself in years past without a problem. Maybe the cheap stuff comes in a narrower-necked bottle?
I did get a big kick out of the second conclusion to the experiment, so I hope that my appreciation of his humor is enough to keep Mr. Adams from squashing me like a bug.
Let me see if I get this correctly. It is proposed that the pressure of the release of carbon dioxide from solution in the champagne is withheld by the bowl of a spoon coming into contact with the opening of the bottle, held in place by the force of gravity?
And to think they actually wire the corks they shove into those bottles at the winery down… what a waste.
Well, I suppose that if they were able to keep champagne bottles absolutely upright from the production point to the drinking point, they could save a fortune in wire and gold foil seals.
Hmmm, I should probably have clarified a bit. I’m not suggesting that the spoon will do much more than a stopper would do – after all, a spoon hardly provides an airtight seal – but it will slow down the process of the champagne’s getting flat. I couldn’t begin to suggest the scientific process at work here, but remember that in Cecil’s experiment, the best results were obtained by using a bottle stopper.
Wa-a-ay back in my college days, when I first encountered the spoon solution, it was never intended to keep the champagne indefinitely fresh. Usually, it was enough that there were still bubbles the next day.
Now, as I read this, the point being made is that the spoon bowl is covering the opening, keeping in the carbonation. The handle to the spoon is not doing anything in the beveravge, thus the chain didn’t.
This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what keeps a beverage carbonated, and what causes the beverage to loose carbonation. When you have removed the stopper (or tab or cap or whatever is sealing the can/bottle of the beverage), you release the pressure inside the container that helps keep the CO2 in solution (see for more information the recent can-tapping analysis on this site). If you don’t replace the cap/cork/stopper/tab, then the CO2 slowly comes out of solution and joins our atmosphere. Only if you manage to re-seal the opening is there any chance of keeping the CO2 in solution longer, by preventing loss of the CO2 to the general atmosphere. I could be wrong, but I think that release of CO2 in a stoppered bottle will slowly increase the internal pressure and help keep the rest in solution, but the point is, if you don’t SEAL the bottle, the CO2 will leave it. Thus, the spoon bowl, unless it forms a seal over or in the opening, does nothing regarding the carbonation of the drink.
Do you know what, I’ve been thinking about this in the back of my mind the last couple of days, and I realized that while I still think I was right that the experiment Unca Cece performed didn’t cover all the possibilities, I was muddled on the reason why.
Going back to the experiment, the premise being tested was that a silver spoon in the neck of a champagne bottle will keep the champagne from going as flat as if it were uncovered. Cecil opened three bottles of champagne and put a stopper in one, left one uncovered, and since none of his silver spoons would fit in the bottleneck, suspended a silver necklace down into the third. After a night of refrigeration, the stoppered bottle was the fizziest, the uncovered bottle was the next best, and the bottle with the chain had the flattest champagne. (Sorry for the long recap.)
My thought was that a bottle with a spoon might have shown results somewhere in between the uncovered and the stoppered bottles, but it hit me today that there might be no differences at all between a spooned bottle, so to speak, and the uncovered bottle. The point is, there was no spoon used in the experiment, so there’s no way of knowing. To be thorough, perhaps Cecil should have tested both the property of silver and the property of a spoon.
DSYoungEsq, I absolutely accept your point about carbonation being released from a solution unless an airtight seal is maintained. I thought that there had been a problem with the experiment itself, and I still do, but I hadn’t pinpointed it well enough.
