Popular lore has it that the quality of a sparkling wine can be determined by the characteristics of its bubbles. As the saying goes, “The smaller the bubbles, the better the wine.” Regardless of whether that statement is true, it seems uncontroversial to say that the enjoyment of sparkling wine is closely connected to the presence of its bubbles, and certainly the physics and chemistry of bubble formation in sparkling wines have been studied for at least the past two decades. In this Quick Study, we describe some work we did to find out if passive acoustic monitoring—listening to the sounds that the bubbles make as they form and rise in the wine—can be used to extract quantitative information about the bubbles. Passive acoustic monitoring has been applied to other systems involving bubbles—for example, to detect underwater leaks from gas pipes and methane hydrate deposits at the seafloor or to...

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