How does club soda remove red wine stains?
The Internet is full of Web sites discussing whether club soda can defeat red wine stains. Some experiments show that club soda does not work very well, whereas others indicate that it is pretty good at removing red wine, so the evidence still seems to be mixed. There’s no particularly good chemical reason why club soda should remove stains: it’s essentially just water with carbon dioxide dissolved in it, along with some salts. (It is weakly acidic, so it might decolorize stains that can act as acid-base indicators.) Almost everyone, though, seems to have a story. In my experience, club soda does work sometimes. For instance, it’s worked dozens of times for wine spills on our living room carpet (which probably says more about our lifestyle than it does about club soda). But it didn’t work at all on the tablecloth during Christmas dinner, even though the laundromat did the trick the next day. The most common theory suggests that the secret ingredient is the bubbles, and there may be som
