LET’S GET FIZZICAL
Take a 2ft sabre – and slice! JANE FRYER learns the art of sabrage for opening champagne and finds it’s a cut above popping a cork...
THERE is something rather intoxicating about brandishing a 2ft-long, shiny steel sabre in one hand and a bottle of champagne – wire cage and foil removed – in the other. It helps, of course, to be standing in an exquisite wood-panelled dining room while wearing a very dashing, matching green and gold embroidered cape and hat.
Even better, to have a handsome Venetian called Paulo Pivota fussing and fiddling around me, adjusting my ceremonial cape to perfection, checking the angle of the three-kilo sabre and ensuring that no-one and nothing is within a 30-degree angle of my loaded bottle of Lanson Black Label.
I am about to join the ranks, not only of champagne-crazy Napoleon Bonaparte and his lusty Hussars (more of whom later), but also actress Patricia Hodge, chef Gordon Ramsay, TV presenter Cat Deeley and thousands of others in learning the art of sabrage: slicing the top of a champagne bottle – cork and all – clean off, with a sword.
For this is the ultimate in ostentatious showy-offness. A flamboyant garnish to add to any social gathering (so long as everyone is safely out of the firing line).
The art of sabrage is increasingly popular as it seems we’re no longer content with quietly peeling off the foil, removing the wire basket and diligently turning the bottle, not the cork, as we’ve always been told.
PEOPLE now seem to want to pretend they’re in 19th-century France, slicing, roaring, yelling and sloshing the amber bubbles straight from the truncated neck in a masterful way like Napoleon, who once said: ‘Champagne! In victory one deserves it; in defeat one needs it.’ Indeed, Old Boney drank it – invariably sabraged – pretty much all the time.
‘Sabrage is going from strength to strength!’ says Julian White, the swashbuckling ambassador emeritus of the Confrérie du Sabre d’Or (Brotherhood of the Golden Sword).
Julian, 76, adores champagne, refers to it as ‘O be joyful’, enjoyed his first glass of French fizz when he was just seven and says his perfect meal would involve ‘a bottle of champagne, a magnum of burgundy and then back to pink champagne for pudding, ideally’.
This year, the Confrérie du Sabre d’Or – which describes itself as a ‘cut above’ all other champagne clubs, and looks an awful lot of fun – will celebrate its 20th anniversary with a Gala Ball in October.
It turns out there is an entire sabrage world out there.
The society has inducted more than 15,000 sabreurs – hopefully today I will join their lofty rank – and hands out medals and titles to more accomplished sabreurs.
There are also sabrage groups online and sabrage-friendly hotels and restaurants which offer the chance to decapitate your own bottle with style. (At the Milestone Hotel in London, where I am being so expertly tutored, a lesson in sabrage – in ceremonial gear – will add just £15 (€17) to your bill.) There’s even a sabrage magazine, edited by Julian and called, what else but, The Golden Sword, crammed with pictures of the sabreurs’ astonishingly busy social scene – most of which seems to involve black tie, red faces and a lot of laughter – and boasting features with titles such as ‘Travels with my sabre’.
But for now, back to my lesson. After hastily moving some delicate glassware out of range, Paulo begins my instruction with the legend of Madame Clicquot, the beautiful young widow who in 1805 inherited her husband’s small champagne house near Reims, Champagne, at the age of 27.
The widow (or ‘veuve’ in French) Clicquot was apparently the start of it all. She had a penchant for entertaining Napoleon’s dashing officers in her vineyard and, as they galloped off at dawn with their complimentary bottle of champagne, they would shear it open with their sabre to impress her. The trick soon caught on and, in no time, whenever Napoleon’s cavalrymen arrived from yet another spectacular victory, they’d catch bottles of champagne hurled their way from grateful townsfolk, and slice the tops off with their brass-hilted sabres.
While genuine Napoleonic sabres are in short supply these days, sabrage purists still insist on a sword of some sort.
Julian decapitated his first champagne bottle in his long-ago army days ‘with some implement of war’ and has barely drunk a bottle of champagne since without unsheathing his sword first.
‘What could be more fun?’ he says.’ But there are a few other options. Paulo lets slip that, while it is not offi- cially recognised, provided you know what you’re doing and adopt the sabreurs’ golden code of ‘firm wrist and high elbow’, it is possible to slice the top off a champagne bottle with most heavy knives.
Carving, bread, steak or even butter knives – he has successfully sabraged with all. ‘I’ve even done it with a teaspoon! And, occasionally, I’ve done two at once held together!’ he beams, before giving me a hard stare and saying: ‘Of course you must never try this at home – and never after drinking heavily!’
He is quite right. At my husband’s 40th, his best friend had a go with a large carving knife, rather too far into a long evening of celebrations, and lopped off part of his thumb, instead of the bottle. Happily, despite being ‘very heavily’ insured, the society has had no such disasters.
‘The only accidents we’ve had are when someone stupidly picks up the sabraged bottle not by the base, but by the neck,’ says Julian. ‘Or drops it on their toe.’
Paulo looks appalled and runs through the ground rules.
First, the neck of the champagne bottle should be super chilled – too warm and the cork will pop of its own accord when the wire cradle is removed.
Next, the wire cage is removed. The bottle must be held at a 45degree angle – facing away from people, glasses, chandeliers, flower arrangements – and the sword is placed flat on the bottle, blade resting against the seam that runs down the side from top to bottom. And from there, one sharp movement up the neck of the bottle should do it.
SCIENCE dictates that there is no danger of broken glass ending up in the bottle because of the pressure inside – equivalent, Paulo tells me, to that of a tyre on a doubledecker bus. So the break in the glass is absolutely clean.
The top of the bottle is severed less than an inch from the top and the cork comes off with a small band of glass still attached to it.
According to Julian, it works just as well on bottles of any size – magnums, jeroboams (the equivalent of four bottles), methuselahs (eight bottles) and Balthazars (16 bottles) – and there is a definite hierarchy among sabreurs as to ‘how big’ a bottle they’ve sabraged. ‘Most men can hold a jeroboam,’ says Julian. ‘And some of our girls are quite strong, too, and love champagne!’
At one private dinner at the Milestone, more than 21 diners opened their own bottle with no injuries whatsoever – no doubt they, unlike my husband’s friend, opened first, and drank later.
Merrily, Julian insists there is no need to ever suffer a champagne hangover. ‘Champagne creates acidity in the stomach, the best cure for which is burgundy – it settles it beautifully – then off back to champagne,’ he says. ‘So while you might have a surfeit of booze, you will not have a hangover.’
Meanwhile, I angle the bottle to the wood panelling, lay the sword on the bottle, keep my left wrist firm and my right elbow high and thrust the sabre up.
And, ‘pop!’, there it goes, with a small hiss, a gentle fizz and not a single drop spilled. In fact, it was so easy that it felt, well, dare I say it – and I certainly wouldn’t share this with Julian or Paulo – a teeny bit anti-climactic.
On top of that, it takes us an age to find the top of the bottle, which is just a couple of metres away on the floor.
Next time, I’ll raise the stakes and try it with a teaspoon... on a magnum.