It’s said that you can tell a champagne’s quality by the size of its bubbles: the smaller the bubbles, the better the champagne. Though the theory is unconfirmed, one possible explanation is that sparkling wine naturally loses some carbonation as it ages, which leads to more delicate bubbles in older champagnes. When Kyle Spratt and his coworkers at Applied Research Laboratories at the University of Texas, Austin, learned of this theory, they decided to use their scientific expertise to study the effervescence. “Once we heard that the bubble size was important for champagne, we naturally thought, Why don’t we try to determine the bubble size acoustically?” Spratt tells Newscripts. He and his team, which primarily studies underwater acoustics for sonar applications, presented their method at the Acoustical Society of America conference in New Orleans last month.
