TAKE care if you鈥檙e planning to toast the New Year with champagne. The
bubbles in this most celebratory of tipples really do get you drunk more
quickly.
Many people say that champagne bubbles 鈥済o straight to their head鈥�, making
them giggly and light-headed. Researchers have now confirmed these inebriating
effects in the lab for the first time.
Fran Ridout and a team in the human psychopharmacology unit at the University
of Surrey in Guildford threw a couple of 鈥渄rinks parties鈥� for volunteers in
their department. Unbeknown to the volunteers, Ridout used the occasions to test
the influence of the bubbles in bubbly.
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She gave champagne to 12 volunteers鈥攈alf drank fizzy champagne and the
other half had flat champagne, purged of its bubbles beforehand with a whisk.
The following week, she repeated the experiment but gave each volunteer the
opposite kind of champagne to the previous time. That way, everyone tried both
types of wine.
Each person drank two glasses of champagne per session. Ridout adjusted the
exact intakes so that everyone drank the same amount of alcohol per kilogram of
body mass. Sure enough, alcohol levels rose much faster among the bubbly
drinkers. After just five minutes, they had an average of 0.54 milligrams of
alcohol per millilitre of blood. Those drinking flat champagne averaged just
0.39 milligrams of alcohol.
At the end of the 40-minute experiment, those drinking the fizzy tipple
averaged 0.7 milligrams per millilitre鈥攋ust 0.1 milligrams short of the
legal limit for driving in Britain. Those drinking flat champagne had only
reached 0.58 milligrams.
The experiment, supervised by Carlo Nunes of Epsom General Hospital in
Surrey, also showed that bubbly has a greater impact on people鈥檚 perception.
In standard computer psychomotor tests, bubbly-drinkers took 200 milliseconds
longer on average to notice peripheral objects than when they were sober. Those
on flat wine took only an extra 50 milliseconds. Fizzy drinkers were also less
vigilant, having more trouble spotting sequences of three odd or even numbers
within a random sequence. But neither drink affected memory or general reaction
times more than the other.
At the end of the experiment, the bubbly drinkers were visibly worse for
wear. 鈥淪ome could hardly write,鈥� she says. It emphasises the importance of not
drinking anything before driving, says Ridout.
For non-drivers, one trick to avoid getting so plastered is to drink
champagne from a shallow goblet. The large surface area allows the bubbles to
dissipate quickly, whereas flutes preserve the fizz
(New 杏吧原创, 25 December 1999/1 January 2000, p 58).
But it remains a mystery why bubbly gets you drunk quicker. 鈥淚t must be
absorbed from the digestive system quicker,鈥� says Ridout. Normally, we absorb 20
per cent of any alcohol we drink in the stomach and the remainder in the
intestines. One theory is that carbon dioxide in the bubbles somehow speeds the
flow of alcohol into the intestines.