If you’ve ever been hit by a flying champagne cork, you may be painfully conscious of the stress in a bottle of fizz. And that stress inside—and out of doors—the bottle has caught the imaginations of champagne innovators.

“We conduct many trials every year to fine-tune the pressure to the vintage,” says Louis Roederer’s chef de cave, Jean Baptiste Lécaillon. “We have a lower pressure—so smaller bubbles—[because] we want a seamless and soft mousse.”

The stress inside a bottle of champagne is usually round 6 bar, or 3 times the stress of a automotive tire. But Louis Roederer champagnes can vary from 6 to 4.5 bar. “The more acidity you have in the wine, the more aggressive the feeling of the bubbles … This is also why we are on the low side,” explains Lécaillon, “especially on Cristal, which is often non-malo [referring to malolactic fermentation] and low pH.” The newly launched Cristal 2015, he says, “is a great example of this featherlight mousse … It is at the same time delicious, effortlessly intense, and delicate.”

One solely wants a fundamental grasp of physics to understand that storing champagne at greater temperatures will improve the stress inside. But scientists had been astonished to find that when a bottle saved at 20 levels Celsius (nicely above cellar temperature) was uncorked, the rate of fuel expelled from the bottleneck momentarily reached virtually Mach 2—twice the velocity of sound.

The Ballistics of Bubbly

Researcher Gérard Liger-Belair, professor of chemical physics on the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, likens this phenomenon “to what happens with rocket plume exhausts.” The stress causes the CO₂ to freeze and switch to dry ice when all of a sudden launched, making a plume on the bottle opening.

Liger-Belair is a specialist in champagne and effervescence, and the creator of Uncorked: The Science of Champagne. But he hopes the findings, revealed in an academic journal final 12 months, may even have functions within the fields of ballistics and rocketry.

The stress in a champagne bottle falls over time, leading to smaller and scarcer bubbles—and that extra composed, somewhat quieter character can usually be a part of the allure of a long-aged cuvée.

In the identify of analysis, Dom Pérignon’s cellar grasp Vincent Chaperon as soon as tried to reinvigorate the bubbles in a bottle of Dom Pérignon Plénitude 2, which is aged on the lees for 15 to twenty years, or round twice so long as a flagship DP. He received’t say how he did it (SodaStream? Aarke?), however he admits the outcome was “unharmonious—not good.”