This festive article adorned T Magazine this week. I've always wanted to see this in person. Now I want to try it! Or at least go to Eleven Madison Park and have the spouse propose to me again. I can only imagine how this would look in a posh dining room. I'm ready to throw a party!
Case Study | On Beheading Bubbly
Though we like to think of ourselves as a humble people who disdain ostentatious display, there are those occasions that encourage, nay, demand the chest-thumping, post-touchdown hubris inherent in our species. One of these is the presentation of a frosty bottle of Champagne. It’s like a convoluted Myers-Briggs test for personalities. Many people open such a gift, even on New Year’s Eve, with the gravity of a monk, showing the respect and discretion due a vinous masterwork. But there are those more excitable oenophiles, whose personal standard — “What Would Pirates Do?” — dictates freeing the bubbly soul by lopping off the bottle’s neck with a saber.
Why would anyone take a blade to Champagne? Well, frankly, it allows you to embrace your inner jackass under the guise of being dashing, with the entire drippingly elegant historical pageant of Champagne to lend your puerile posturing legitimacy and panache. I still can’t decide if sabering Champagne is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of, or one of the greatest, but it’s precisely that tension that makes it so stirring. It’s like climbing mountains in that way, except you don’t get as cold, and there’s Champagne more immediately afterwards.
There is all manner of ill-ascribed history to “l’art du sabrage,” upheld by posh dining clubs, which exult in a legend that harks back to Napoleon’s elite corps of lightning-fleet, saber-wielding Hussars. Take your pick of which dubious grandiosity you prefer: the Hussars developed the practice while leaving on horseback for battle; they developed the practice when returning from victories; or in homage to the widow Clicquot for her hospitality; or in Russia to impress the local ladies, and so on. … Parsing the reality of any of this is the work of someone else, ostensibly someone who cares. The important part, for us, is that it sounds great, all of it.
In fact, just make up your own Hussar-related history while you’re preparing the bottle, and give it some meaty personal embellishments to cover the time it takes you to clear the capsule, scrape the paper from the neck and free the cage from around the cork: “It so happens that my great, great grandmother, who was the only woman on the corps of Napoleon’s light cavalry, and had to dress surreptitiously as a man to so be, handed down, in a matrilineal line, her regiment’s manner of celebrating. I chanced to be watching on the day my mother schooled my sisters in it.” After all, this is about showmanship, not scholarship.
On to the pyrotechnics! And perhaps the stitches? No, no, be lionhearted; really, there’s nothing to it. The whole thing is predicated on very hard and firm-ish science. In the construction of the heavily reinforced bottle that keeps Champagne from exploding after it’s been dosed with a notch of beet sugar and capped back up to undergo a secondary fermentation (thereby creating over six atmospheres of pressure within), there are, as with any construction, natural weak spots. In our shameless grab for gusto and savoir-vivre, we will exploit these.
There are two seams running vertically the length of the bottle where the halves are fused, and a ringed flange atop that caps these two. After super-chilling the bottle — to both calm the wine so that it doesn’t all gork out the top upon being freed and to make the bottle, I suppose, a tad more brittle — we will run our “saber” up along the seam of the bottle to strike the top ring where it meets the seam with considerable aplomb. This is the work of the blink of an eye, but preparation is very important.
How to Saber a Bottle of Champagne, Carefully
1.) Remove the foil capsule and tear away the paper around the neck of the bottle as well. You will remove the wire cage also, but only immediately before sabering.
2.) Chill the bottle very, very well. Make a thick slurry of ice and water in a large bucket and chill the wine, making certain it is submerged entirely in the cold, for at least an hour. It must be extremely cold, or it may all just crumble in a heartbreaking explosion in your mitts. In fact, I turn mine upside down to make sure the neck is utterly cold. Dustin Wilson, the wine director of Eleven Madison Park — where they saber the house-imported Cuvée Vigneron from grower-winemaker Roger Pouillon only for couples getting engaged in the restaurant — stresses to his sommeliers that the single most import aspect of the process is “getting that bottle arctic.”
3.) Once the bottle is brutally cold, remove the wire cage. Locate one of the seams and place your weapon flat along it, using the dull side. Hold it out from your body, at a 45 degree slant and pointed away from any onlookers. Run your blade flat along the seam, in a straight line up, striking the neck ring forcefully (and simultaneously shrieking “Sauve qui peut!”).
4.) With any luck, or the merest practice, the ring pops off like nothing, and you should lose very little wine. It’s quite surgical. If the first go doesn’t get it, don’t be discouraged. Make some self-deprecating witticism, line it up and try again. Once you’re victorious, and understandably elated, refrain from the urge to swig from the open bottle. That, too, is surgical, but in a different way.
5.) The outward force of the pressure releasing immediately blows any stray shards of glass out and away from the bottle. This means you needn’t worry about drinking glass shards, but you do need to pass the Swiffer around the dining room before traipsing about barefoot. Or better, saber your Champagne on a beach.
This does work with other sparkling wines, it goes without saying, but not with all others. Some bottles, like very cheap cavas and non-reinforced bottles of vin pétillant, don’t work. If the wine is a full-on sparkler and the bottle is thick and seems to have prominent seams running up it, you’re most likely fine. People even do it with beer bottles. Wouldthese guys approve of that? I’m certain not, which makes me all the more eager to saber beer now.
The knife is relatively unimportant, I’m almost sad to say. Online you can find videos of people offing the heads of Champagne bottles with spoons, butter knives, belt bucklesand rings — maybe flowers if you search hard enough. All you need is a blunt edge and a stern knock. The dull backside of a regular 8-inch chef’s knife is, if a bit less swashbuckling than many of us might hope for, perfectly serviceable and at least something you’re bound to have about. There are a number of esteemed cutlery purveyors who make actual Champagne sabers: dull-edged, carnival-esque knives meant solely for this purpose. Such over-thought luxury gear seems not just unnecessary but frankly slightly dorky; it’s like being the guy who shows up to a pick-up game with the full matching Lebron jersey and shorts. If, on the other hand, it happens that you’ve the odd bayonet or lancer’s épée idling in the pantry, by all means step up; that’s exactly the kind of bold display for which style points are reserved, and it’s nice to (peaceably) repurpose a weapon that hasn’t seen service since the Boer War.
If you need more guidance, the best tutorial I could imagine comes from Dave Arnold, the erstwhile director of technology at the French Culinary Institute and all-around Johnny-on-the-spot enabler for ill-advised and possibly perilous culinary undertakings. If you need yet more impetus, I give you this quote from Paul Claudel, the French dramatist and diplomat: “Gentlemen, in the little moment that remains to us between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well drink a glass of Champagne.” To which I can only add: and let’s chop its head off with a sword!
