I have been told by someone who claims to know that you can preserve the carbonation in a half-consumed bottle of champagne by hanging a silver spoon upside down in the neck, with the handle suspended in the contents. As a none-too-convincing explanation for this miracle my source mumbled something about electrolysis. Any truth to this? –Joe Ryan, Chicago
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I asked the Champagne News and Information Bureau in New York and Paterno Imports, a champagne importer in Chicago, about the silver-spoon idea. 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 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.
