A glass of bubbly gives you a thrill
BUBBLES bursting from a glass of champagne do a great deal more than tickle the nose – they release a host of chemicals that make every sparkling glass an uplifting sensory experience.
That’s according to a new study carried out by scientists in a bid to find out why a bottle of bubbly is such a hit on special occasions.
Using a cutting edge technique, researchers held a microscope slide two to five millimetres above a glass of just-poured champagne so that the bubbles rose and collapsed just beneath it.
The chemicals released by the popping bubbles collected on the slide and were passed through a mass spectrometer - a machine that looks at the atomic make-up of different substances and identifies their chemical “fingerprints”.
The experiment showed that the surface of sparkling champagne or wine behaves much like the surface of the sea whereby organic chemicals are dragged to the surface by bubbles and released in the air as tiny droplets called aerosols.
The champagne test, described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed “hundreds” of chemical components.