Some fascinating facts for Champagne lovers, from today's New York Times:

"Gérard Liger-Belair is a physicist at the University of Reims, where he trains a high-speed digital camera through a microscope onto glasses of wine from local cellars. His 2004 book, “Uncorked: The Science of Champagne,” revealed that most Champagne bubbles arise from something you might be tempted to scour from your flutes: dust.

Kitchen towels and the ambient air deposit tiny hollow cellulose fibers from cotton, paper and other plant products on the surface of a clean glass. The air pockets in those hollow fibers allow dissolved carbon dioxide molecules in the wine to collect and pop off in a bubble, which leaves a remnant behind to start the process all over again. As they rise in the glass, the bubbles gather more carbon dioxide, so they expand and accelerate. When they burst at the surface, they shoot tiny jets of liquid as much as an inch into the air, tickling the nose and delivering aroma.

In more recent work Professor Liger-Belair has shown just how lucky we are in the quality of our plant dust. It turns out that the cellulose fiber hollows are of just the right size — about a tenth the diameter of a human hair — to produce small, regularly spaced bubbles that keep coming for a long time. If they were much narrower, then the bubbles would be released faster and closer together, and the gas would be exhausted from the glass much sooner. If the fiber interior were as wide as a hair, then the bubbles would be more coarse, and we wouldn’t get as many of them.

Because the fibers and the gas pockets are scattered across the glass surface, each bubble train rises in undisturbed isolation. The result is a clockwork release of bubbles, evenly spaced and pleasing to the eye."