Friday, September 12, 2008

Today on Serious Grape: One Perfect Glass of Bubbles

Today in my column Serious Grape on Serious Eats, I tackle the subject of drinking single glasses of wine.

Like many of you, I'm the only drinker in my house. If I didn't open wine unless someone was there to share it with, I'd be very thirsty. And, there is no way I'm downing a whole bottle.

I love sparkling wine, and often have a glass while I'm cooking dinner or watching the news. And I find that sparkling wines are actually some of the easiest wines to keep tasting fresh. I drink one bottle of sparkling wine over 5 days--and enjoy the last glass as much as the first.

Check out my preferred method of keeping sparkling wine fresh, find a link to the results of Rational Denial's pump vs. inert gas experiment for still wine, and get my current recommendation for a great sparkling wine that costs under $10 in most markets by clicking over to the story.

Have a great weekend--and have a glass of bubbly.

4 comments:

Dave said...

Are there really still wine drinkers who don't know about champagne stoppers? I must have about half a dozen of them; you can keep one in the car, one in the picnic bag - they are cheap and handy, and they really work.

Dr. Debs said...

Yep. I just handed out a handful of them last Christmas and people expressed surprise that they "worked." And even those that had them never tried to use them more than overnight. I agree, at less than $5 there's no excuse to ever be without one!

Director, Lab Outreach said...

Professor, Very kind of you to refer to your readers to one of our more serious science projects! Thanks!

We might need to do some work at the Lab on Henry's Law (applies to dissolved gas in liquids) at the Lab. I suspect (which usually means I'm guessing) that the CO2 coming out of solution in sparkling wine creates something like a buffer layer that protects the wine from oxidation when you stopper the bottle and reset the equilibrium. There's no doubt that champagne lasts longer under a stopper than still wine does, no matter what you do to it. Gotta be the CO2, right?

Big Cheers!

Anonymous said...

I've been using the sparkling wine stoppers forever and get the same startled reaction from people when they see it....it's a blessing, though I will readily admit that unlike you, my bottle NEVER lasts 5 days unless I suddenly become ill or get, ummm, I dunno, excommunicated from the country!

http://gonzogastro.wordpress.com