Champagne tastes different in plastic cups compared to glass flutes, study finds

Sign up to IndyEat's free newsletter for weekly recipes, foodie features and cookbook releases Get our food and drink newsletter for free Get our food and drink newsletter for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. If you think the prosecco you crack open at your desk before the work Christmas party and sip from a plastic water cooler cup doesn’t taste as good as it normally does at home from a glass flute, you’d be correct - serving sparkling wine in plastic or polystyrene cups makes the bubbles behave differently. “It turns out the bubble formation process on styrofoam is completely different than on glass,” said lead study author Kyle S. Spratt from the Applied Research Laboratories at the University of Texas at Austin. “Using plastic glasses, for example, really isn’t so good because the bubbles actually stick quite strongly to the walls of the glass bigger before they lift off,” said Andrea Sella, professor of inorganic chemistry at University College London. “There is a well-known notion that the quality of a sparkling wine is correlated to the size of its bubbles, and we are investigating whether the bubble size distribution of a sparkling wine can be obtained from simple acoustical measurements.” The team investigated the properties of the bubbles using a hydrophone, a piezoelectric transducer-based device that records underwater sound.