Crucial party tip for serving your glass of sparkling wine. Use a dirty flute.

Crucial party tip for serving your glass of sparkling wine. Use a dirty flute.

Warning Rupophobists: you’re not going to like this.

Imagine pouring your freshly opened bottle of bubbles into a flute and seeing...no bubbles? A tragic event indeed, sure to ruin the weekend of even your most grateful guest at your Thanksgiving gathering.

How to prevent such a tragedy? Simply serve your bubbles in a dirty flute. Ideally refuse comprised of paper and linen filaments.

A perfectly clean glass will produce no bubbles.  It’s a fact.  The carbon dioxide in the bottle of bubbly would escape through the free surface of the liquid. Bubbles only form from tiny bits of trash on the surface of the glass, an area lovingly called a bubble nursery.  I prefer the hard scientific term “bubble nucleation site”.  Sounds more impressive, especially when saying it out loud.

Now some of you stemware enthusiasts will argue that an imperfection or scratch in the flute serves as the bubble nucleation site.  But there is a critical radius of curvature of 0.2 micrometer required for your bubbles to form and those scratches on the surface are just too small. Only fragments on the surface of the glass will do.

The desired debris is shaped in microscopic cylindrical fibers originating from the cloth used to wipe the flute dry or from paper bits that floated onto your flute. There is a cavity in these filth filaments that form a gas pocket and when you pour your sparkling wine onto the dirty surface, viola! You have your bubble nursery and the bubbles are born!

 Party tragedy has been prevented and as an added bonus you now have a remarkable factlet that will impress your guests and fill any awkward silences at the party.