Why does putting a teaspoon in the top of an open bottle of champagne or sparkling wine stop it going flat?
It doesn’t. Perhaps the most authoritative debunking of this intriguing urban myth was a scientific experiment conducted in 1987 by the Comité Interprofessional du Vin de Champagne, which reported its findings in the French newspaper Le Républicain Lorrain on March 17 that year.
Six bottles of the same wine were drawn off from the same vat and the pressure of the carbonic gas in solution was measured with an aphrometer. Two glasses from each bottle were drawn off. Two bottles were corked hermetically, two had teaspoons inserted in the neck and two were left open before being placed in the fridge for 24 hours at 11C (52F). The pressures were then measured again. The corked bottles kept their pressure, but there was no diference between the pressure of the wine in the open bottles and that in the spooned bottles.
Peter Verstage,
Douglas, Isle of Man
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As owner-managers of a country wine shop in the 1980s my partners and I always kept three or four bottles open for tasting and, since nothing is more counter-productive than offering flat fizzy, we were motivated to carry out extensive comparative tests.
We proved to our satisfaction that, once opened, a decent fizzy was invariably good for 24 hours and that nothing — teaspoons, forks, rubber stoppers — made the slightest difference. Only two things did: the surface area of the wine in contact with the air, and the volume of wine left in the bottle. The smaller the first and the greater the second, the longer the bubbles lasted. We just forced ourselves to finish the bottle.
Gordon Medcalf,
Woking, Surrey
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Why, in some instruments, is the note played not the note heard?
The system of “transposing instruments” began as a convenience to players. The simplest key to finger on an instrument was written as C major (the simplest key to read) and the notation adjusted to produce the correct result. Players could choose different sizes of instrument according to the key of the music, so they were always playing in a simple key. This became less relevant in the 19th century as the tonal range within a piece of music expanded and a change of instrument was not feasible.
Players still need to change instrument readily and the transposing system enables them to use a single fingering system for more than one size of instrument. It still applies for the oboe, cor anglais and clarinet, including the bass clarinet. (This leads to the odd situation that music for a bass instrument is written in the treble clef.) It is particularly valuable in the saxophone family, where all sizes have the same fingering, and in the brass band, where all instruments apart from the trombone use the same fingering system.
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For historical reasons, the recorder is not a transposing instrument, and this causes some discouragement to young players who learn on the descant. When they are ready to move on, they are often unwilling to learn the treble recorder because they need to learn a new fingering. They have to wait until their hands are large enough to play a tenor.
Rosemary Broadbent
Stockport, Cheshire
Did anyone, having dual nationality, make a purely conscientious choice between two sides in a war?
Perhaps the most remarkable instance of divided loyalty was to be found during the War of the Spanish Succession.
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In 1707 the allied forces in Spain, led by the Earl of Galway, were heavily defeated at the battle of Almanza by a French army under the command of the Duke of Berwick. Galway, also known as Henri, Marquis de Ruvigny, was an expatriate French Huguenot, while Berwick (James Fitzjames Stuart) was the son of the exiled King James II by his mistress Arabella Churchill — and thereby the nephew of John, Duke of Marlborough, by then the victor of Blenheim and Ramillies.
John Fidler,
Lancaster
Who were the first “terrible twins”?
Roy Hyde, Cheltenham
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Why did internet-enabled television sets vanish from the marketplace?
P. Dufhur, London EC1
Has any country lost its entire population in a war?
Aloysus Spedding, Edinburgh