Will a silver spoon in the neck preserve your leftover New Year’s Eve bubbly?

Illustration by Slug Signorino

Cecil replies:

Cecil hears a lot of weird theories like this. Sample: you can tell if someone has used LSD because an X-ray of their jaw will show a glowing line. No way was I getting my jaw X-rayed, column or no column. But this champagne thing sounded like it might be good for a few laughs.

I asked the Champagne News and Information Bureau in New York and Paterno Imports, a champagne importer in Chicago, about the silver spoon gambit. The responses from various parties: (1) never heard of this; (2) heard of it but think it’s a crock, and (3) whatsamatter, these people never heard of stoppers? The folks at the CN&IB, in fact, were kind enough to send me a reusable stopper made of stainless steel.

We then moved to the experimental stage. Cecil obtained three standard (750 ml) bottles of champagne at the bargain price of two for $5 — not stuff he would care to drink, frankly, but adequate for the purpose at hand.

We uncorked all three bottles and attempted to insert a silver spoon into one. Here we ran into our first complication: none of our silver spoons had a handle skinny enough to fit. In fact, the only spoon of any description that would fit into a bottle was a long-handled stainless steel baby-feeding spoon. Mighty suspicious, and definitely inclining us to think that nobody promoting this theory had ever actually tried it.

Spurning the baby spoon on the ground that stainless steel was not sufficiently reactive, we accepted Mrs. Adams’s offer of a silver chain. We noted that when we placed the chain in the bottle, suspending it from the neck with a paper clip, bubble production in the champagne greatly increased — mainly, we guessed, because the chain provided an abundance of nucleation sites where bubbles could form. We put the bottle with the chain in the fridge, along with a second opened but chainless bottle plus a third that had been opened and immediately capped with the CN&IB stopper.

Next morning we tested for carbonation. We did this by covering the mouth of each bottle with a, uh, condom. OK, maybe they don’t do it that way at the National Science Foundation, but when you’re on a budget you take certain shortcuts. Condom in place, we gave the open-but-chainless bottle a couple of vigorous shakings. The condom inflated fully. After only a single shaking the condom on the stoppered bottle not only inflated, but champagne bubbled up into it and began leaking out the bottom. However, no amount of shaking would cause the condom on the bottle with the chain to inflate more than partway.

Conclusion #1: not only does silver not preserve carbonation, if anything it will make the champagne go flatter faster. Conclusion #2: if you want your condom to inflate when things get shaking, keep the stopper on the alcoholic beverages.

Cecil Adams

Send questions to Cecil via cecil@straightdope.com.