Does Putting A Metal Spoon In Champagne Really Keep It Fizzy?

Imagine this: you’ve had a long week at work and fancy a little treat. There’s that bottle of bubbly that's been hanging around in the back of the cupboard since Christmas, but there’s a problem – you’re not planning on drinking it all in one go, but you’ve got nothing to seal it with. Then you remember something your grandma said about sticking a teaspoon in the neck of the bottle to keep champagne fizzy. That can’t work, surely?

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While grandmas are right about a lot of things, this isn’t one of them. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where this myth came from or even how it’s supposed to work. The spoon would need to have some sort of property that stopped carbon dioxide – the thing that makes fizzy wine fizzy – from escaping, considering that the skinny handle of a teaspoon isn’t exactly sealing the bottle. 

Spoons have no such magical or scientific powers. And yet, somehow, the myth that putting a silver spoon handle-down in your champers will keep it as bubbly as the day it was opened has spread far and wide – even over 30 years after investigations debunked it.

One of the more informal of those investigations was carried out in 1994 by Stanford University chemist Professor Richard Zare and author Harold McGee, who writes about the chemistry of food and cooking. They’d both been asked by reporters if the spoon method had anything to it, and they were determined to find out once and for all.

They gathered up eight amateur taste testers – made up of their partners and friends – and got them to test champagne treated in five different ways: from a bottle only just opened; one opened 26 hours earlier and left uncorked; another opened earlier with a silver spoon in the neck; the same as previous but with a stainless steel spoon; and opened earlier but re-corked.

The spoons didn’t appear to keep the champagne particularly fizzy – no surprise there – but re-corking the bottle seemed to perform even worse, which came as a surprise to Zare and McGee. Still, they suspected it had something to do with both the champagne production method giving each bottle unique properties – and that the testers may have become progressively tipsier as the experiment went on.

But another study in 1994 would be the nail in the coffin for the spoon method. Carried out by the Interprofessional Committee of Champagne, a team assessed the differences in change in pressure and loss of weight – as well as carrying out a sensory analysis with expert champagne testers – in bottles treated in five different ways: opened, with nothing else put in it; a silver teaspoon; a stainless steel teaspoon; a cork stopper; and a metal lid.

Unsurprisingly, the spoon method didn’t seem to do anything to keep the champagne fizzy, seeing a significant loss in pressure and weight, and taste tests further showed spoons had no effect on preserving the bubbles.

“The laws of physics remain unshaken – too bad for our Nobel Prize!” remarked the authors of the report.

Instead of wasting spoons and your money, they instead recommend using a proper champagne bottle stopper. If that’s not an option, then it’s worth trying to keep the bottle as cool as possible, as this slows down the release of the bubbles.

Cheers!