Champagne does get you drunk faster

By Andy Coghlan

Take care if you are 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 “go straight to their head”, 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 “drinks parties” for volunteers in their department. Unbeknown to the volunteers, Ridout used the occasions to test the influence of the bubbles in bubbly.

She gave champagne to 12 volunteers – half 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.

Less vigilant

At the end of the 40-minute experiment, those drinking the fizzy tipple averaged 0.7 milligrams per milliliter – just 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’s 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 there was no difference in how the two drinks affected memory or general reaction times.

Shallow goblet

At the end of the experiment, the bubbly drinkers were visibly worse for wear. “Some could hardly write,” 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 Scientist magazine, 25 December 1999).

But it remains a mystery why bubbly gets you drunk quicker. “It must be absorbed from the digestive system quicker,” 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.