BEWARE THE SPARKLERS!

Alcoholic drinks are more rapidly intoxicating when they’re bubbly than when they’re served flat. It’s part of the charm of beer, gin and tonic, rum and cola, and many other effervescent combinations. But the most famous and intoxicating bubbly of them all is champagne or sparkling wine.

This is because it has much more dissolved gas in it than all the others. This is why champagne bottles are made thicker than the average wine bottle and the cork must be reinforced. Champagne would simply blow a beer bottle apart. Even without shaking it, the pressure of gas inside a champagne bottle is more than three times that found in the tyres of a car. And this explains its fizz as well as its reputation for putting us under the table.

With the release of the cork, carbon dioxide dissolved in the champagne starts to escape, partly as gas bubbles and partly just wafting away from the surface of the drink. When we drink champagne it’s still filled with dissolved gas, and this gas continues to be released inside our stomachs – but now at a faster rate as it warms to body temperature and gets shaken about. This is when champagne really fizzes, filling our stomach faster and pushing the alcohol onwards in our intestine and into our blood.

The right temperature is also important for champagne to work its magic. The warmer the champagne, the more it foams and bubbles in our glass. So when we drink it there is less dissolved gas and so less immediate intoxication. By contrast, when we drink ice-cold champagne there’s much more dissolved gas, so it will make you drunk a little faster.

Once a bottle is opened the gas starts to escape. The sooner you drink it, the more gas there is. The first glasses poured from the bottle are more bubbly and more intoxicating than the last.