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A glass of champagne is usually the toasting beverage of choice at big celebrations. Every wedding place setting has a flute of tickly bubbles alongside.
The fizz of champagne or sparkling wine is due to bubbles bursting... hundreds every second. The drops are pushed to an inch above the liquid with the speed of 10 feet per second, according to Smithsonian.
The science, art and history of the sparkles is explained in the book, Uncorked: The Science of Champagne. "Champagne making is indeed a three-century-old art, but it can obviously benefit from the latest advances in science," physicist Gerard Liger-Belair said, according to Smithsonian.
Liger-Belair's fascination with champagne's fizz started 20 years ago while drinking a beer after his finals at Paris University, according to Smithsonian. The bubbles are not only carriers of aroma and flavor; they are important pieces of the winemaking process in which carbon dioxide is produced twice.
The bubbles bind to spots on the glass - "bubble-forming hot spots," Smithsonian calls them - and from these spots 30 bubbles per second are released. Beer has a rate of 10 bubbles per second. Without this effervescence, beer, champagne, sparkling wine and soda would all be lifeless and flat.
Auditory shockwaves (albeit tiny ones) are created when liquid tension gets to be too much and the bubbles start to pop, according to Smithsonian. The sound of bubbles bursting is the fizz you hear. Nearly two million bubbles lived and died by the time champagne goes flat.
"Bubbles collapsing close to each other produce unexpected lovely flower-shaped structures unfortunately completely invisible by the naked eye," Liger-Belair said, according to Smithsonian. "This is a fantastic example of the beauty hidden right under our nose."
The bubbles in wine were once thought of by Europeans a result of poor winemaking. Late in the 1400s, a cold snap hit the continent halting fermentation. When the warmer temperatures came back, fermentation continued in the stored bottles, but an excess of carbon dioxide gave the bottles a fizz.
In 1668, the Catholic Church decided it was time to stop the craziness of a fizzy wine, so they asked a monk named Dom Pierre Pérignon (yes, that Dom Pérignon) to get the situation under control. The sparkling wine was anarchic - bottles kept exploding in the cellars - so Pérignon had to figure out how to stop the second round of fermentation.
By the end of the 17th century, the Royal Court of Versailles changed favor toward the bubbly stuff and asked Pérignon for even more bubbles. "Although historical records show that a British doctor developed a recipe for champagne six years before Pérignon began his work, Pérignon would come to be known as the father of champagne thanks to his blending techniques," wrote Smithsonian.
The French Method created by Pérignon uses the idea of the weather blooper than first created the bubbles - and the rest, as they say, is history.
