A good place to start is with the famous words of Benjamin Franklin, who said - "Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy." Just ignore the cold heartless words of the World Bank, which defines ethyl alcohol as, "a colourless, flammable liquid used to preserve fish." After all, God (who is higher than the World Bank) must also love alcohol because He (or She) put a huge cloud of alcohol just 400 light years from the Big Black Hole at the centre of our galaxy. This cloud is about 150 light years across, and holds about a billion billion billion litres of alcohol. But it’s not raining alcohol in big drops. Instead the alcohol is spread so fine that a glass of alcohol is scattered across a volume as big as our planet.

Brewer’s yeast has a few similarities to humans - it loves to eat sugars, and when it does so, it gives off carbon dioxide as a waste product. But one important difference is that it also makes alcohol as a waste product.

We humans tamed brewer’s yeast a long time ago. Archaeologists have examined the pores of ancient pottery to find chemical signatures of various alcoholic drinks - for example, tartaric acid is a chemical abundant in grapes. The archaeologists reckon that 7,000 years ago, our ancestors were fermenting grapes in the Zagros Mountains of Iran, in a small Neolithic village called Hajii Firuz Tepe.

Much more recently, in 1698, the 60-year-old monk, Dom Pierre Perignon, pioneered sparkling champagne by adding sugar to the wine and allowing it to ferment and create more carbon dioxide. He reportedly said to his fellow monks after tasting the sparkling wine for the first time, "Come quickly, I’m drinking stars!"

People will say that champagne "goes to straight to my head" - and Science has proved that they’re right.

Fran Ridout from the Human Psychopharmacology Unit at the University of Surrey, and her team, studied 12 volunteers. The team wanted to see the effect of the bubbles on people’s blood alcohol level. The volunteers drank either freshly-opened fizzy champagne, or else flat champagne that had been criminally de-bubbled beforehand with a whisk. And then she repeated the study with each person having the opposite type of champagne to what they had drunk the first time. In each session, the volunteer drank only two glasses of champagne - with the amount of champagne adjusted for their weight, so that each person had the same amount of alcohol per kilogram of body mass.

After five minutes, the fizzy champagne had pushed the blood alcohol level to 0.54 mg of alcohol per ml of blood (that’s just over the legal limit in Australia), while the flat-champagne drinkers averaged only 0.39 mg/ml. After another 35 minutes, fizzy drinkers were up to 0.7 mg/ml, while the flat-champagne drinkers were still much lower at 0.58 mg/ml.

There were a few other differences between the drinkers of bubbles, and the drinkers of flat champagne. First, the bubble drinkers took an extra 200 milliseconds to notice an object in their field of view as compared to when they were sober - while the flat wine drinkers took only an extra 50 milliseconds. Second, the bubbly drinkers had more trouble in spotting which numbers in a long list were odd or even.

So what’s going on? The short answer is that we don’t know. Alcohol gurgles down from your mouth to your stomach and then to the small intestine.

We know alcohol absorbs out into the blood from the stomach fairly slowly - so if you eat sugars and fatty foods, this tends to close the outflow valve of the stomach, so the alcohol stays there longer, and the blood concentration of alcohol rises slowly. But if you have an empty stomach, the alcohol passes quickly into the small intestine, where it is absorbed rapidly into the blood stream - so you get a faster increase in blood alcohol levels.

So even in 2003, we still don’t know the exact pathway by which the carbon dioxide in champagne and beer bubbles affects the emptying of the stomach, and ultimately, your blood alcohol levels. But I will discuss a few recent surprising discoveries about bubbles in alcohol next time… (Same again, thanks)

Karl S. Kruszelnicki