Pop! The sound of your champagne may reveal its quality
The sound of a champagne bottle popping may say a lot about its quality.
Research from the University of Texas at Austin found that the sounds made by a champagne's bubbles as they bounced off the sides of a glass can give clues about their size.
The size of a sparkling wine's bubbles reveals its level of quality - different-sized bubbles make different sounds.
'There is a well-known notion that the quality of a sparkling wine is correlated to the size of its bubbles, and we are investigating whether the bubble size distribution of a sparkling wine can be obtained from simple acoustical measurements," says Kyle Spratt from the Applied Research Laboratories at the University of Texas at Austin. "When we came across the idea that bubbles play an important role in the quality of a sparkling wine, our first instinct was to drop a hydrophone into a glass and see what kind of sound we can hear."