Uncorked: The Science of Champagne

  • Gérard Liger-Belair
Princeton University Press: 2004. 152 pp. $19.95, £12.95
Star quality: bubbles at the surface of champagne arrange into vortices that look like galaxies. Credit: G. LIGER-BELAIR

This book presents the birth, life and death of a champagne bubble with such gusto, good humour and clarity that you will devour its delicious contents in one gulp. Whereas good champagne is to be sipped, this book is not. You will never experience the sensual elegance of champagne in quite the same way again once you have read this entertaining account of its history and ‘fizzics’.

The author is associate professor of physical sciences at the University of Rheims Champagne-Ardenne and consultant for the research department of champagne house Moët & Chandon. He brings to this topic not only great expertise, but also a fine sense of aesthetics, as he shares his striking photographs of how a bubble forms, rises and bursts. These phenomena are often much more complex than we imagine, but Liger-Belair explains bubble science without resorting to a single equation. He succeeds in clarifying for the non-expert such abstruse topics as fluid dynamics, nucleation phenomena, fermentation and the competition between buoyancy and drag. Uncorked provides just enough science to be authoritative and instructive, and carries the reader enthralled from one chapter to another, like a good detective story.

Liger-Belair has made several important original contributions to the science of champagne. For example, he offers photographic proof that bubbles form more on impurities — often fibres that adhere to the walls of the champagne container (a fluted glass, say) — than on microscratches and irregularities in the container walls. These hollow fibres, which act as tiny bubble guns, are deposited on the walls when the champagne flute is dried with a paper towel or cloth. Indeed, without these defects, champagne would not fizz at all. But bursting bubbles are not the only way champagne loses its sparkle. The dissolved carbon dioxide escapes primarily from the liquid surface of the champagne, rather than from the popping of its many tiny bubbles.

Many mysteries are revealed. Why do bubbles rise more rapidly in soda water than in champagne, and more rapidly in champagne than in beer? All three liquids are mostly water and have approximately the same viscosity. For a solution to this riddle, read Uncorked.

For my own taste, I would have preferred the discussion to have stuck to champagne. Instead, the author ends with an afterword on the future of champagne wines, emphasizing the connection of the human production of carbon dioxide to global warming. He concludes with some speculation: It is “not completely unrealistic to think that we eventually may witness the emergence of fine sparkling wines in Great Britain”. Climate change deserves its own book, a much larger one of a more serious nature; the emphasis on it seems out of place in this vignette, although Liger-Belair's concern about our effect on the environment is shared by almost all scientists.

Many scientists feel that physical principles are part of our daily lives, not just something to be studied in the laboratory. This book reinforces that belief. It would make an excellent Christmas gift to anyone who wants to learn how a scientist views the world — or to anyone who has ever wondered about the mysterious fluid that has launched so many ships and toasted so many celebrations.