Harold McGee: On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen

In December, 2010, the author was a guest on NPR program, Talk of the Nation. There, the author said this about corking champagne: Well, I was in another part of the experiment because Dick's French friends said that the best way to keep a semi-finished bottle of Champagne fresh was to put a silver spoon in the neck. And we thought that putting a cork in the neck would clearly do a much better job of keeping the carbon dioxide in the bottle. So we did a blind tasting. We got some friends together who were interested in this kind of science and did a blind tasting. Some bottles, we opened freshly. Some bottles, we left open overnight. Some bottles, we emptied partway and then put a cork in the neck and let that sit overnight. And we were surprised to find with American sparkling wines, anyway, that some of the bottles that were left open or with a spoon in the neck actually did taste better than bottles that had been recorked. The podcast of that Talk of the Nation episode is posted below.