Have you ever wanted to open a bottle of champagne like they do in the movies or the fancy restaurants, where the sommelier takes a sword and thwacks the cork of the bottle out?
Apparently, it’s easy to do – as evident by the recent WORLD RECORD WINE SABERING attempt by Harry Constantinescu.
While that video makes it look easy… it actually is, if you follow all the right steps:
- Make sure that the bottle is chilled.
- Always use a carbonated bottle. Sabering a non-carbonated beverage will just make a big mess.
- Shell out a little money for a more expensive bottle. Cheap bottle means cheap glass, and you could end up hurting yourself
- Always do this outside if possible. Sure, you could chop off the neck of a bottle inside your house, but why would you want to clean up the mess there?
- Identify the seam on the bottle, and run the saber up that seam to the bottleneck. Be sure that the saber is being held at a 45-degree angle to the bottle.
- Is the champagne safe to drink after being sabered? The carbonation and champagne foam spewing out of the sabered neck of the bottle should be enough to wash away any glass shards… if there are and shards present in the first place. A properly sabered bottle will have a clean break at the point where the bottle meets the cork lip.
Sabering a bottle is not necessarily a speed or force thing — hitting that spot on the bottle with the right angle and momentum is all that’s needed. Check out this slow motion video showing exactly what we’re talking about: