> I'm going to read the articles about bubble size, but the beer homebrewing
> groups tend to believe that CO2 is CO2 and that any difference in bubble
> size is due to other factors ...

Carbonation levels in beer are much lower than sparkling wine but the
'medium' is probably a lot more viscous among other things. I make
beer too, but I carbonate naturally. I don't make enough to feel a
need to buy a kegging system . Yet.

I read both of these articles and while I followed the logic I'm not
sure they gave enough info to make a conclusion. They compared
champagne to inexpensive sparkling wine and said they were different
as to bubble formation even though they had similar CO2 diffusion
which I'm sure is true. If the point is that pressure is only one
factor, I guess I agree. If they would have said they were both
wines of similar alcohol, acidity, residual alcohol and similar aging
on similar yeasts I would have found it more useful though. (To be
fair, they said 'inexpensive' and that implies the non-champagne was
not aged on the yeast the same amount of time as the champagne.)

I make sparkling wines but I age them for several years in the bottle
on the yeast. The bubbles are tiny. I make it from Seyval, which
would horrify someone from Champagne if we were to compare. In other
words, I hear what they are saying but am having a hard time accepting
it at face value. The Seyval is not a noble grape but makes a very
good sparkling wine and the bubbles are tiny. I have never bought a
$150 bottle of champagne but I doubt those bubbles are smaller than
mine are. I would suspect time on the yeast has a lot to do with this
if I had to guess and I did it without resorting to spectrum analysis;
I read a book... Sometimes you can get too caught up in the
science; I liked the comment in the second article about science and
art.

Joe