The first time you see someone sabre a bottle of Champagne a series of thoughts run through your mind:
- Why is that person waving a knife…or perhaps a sword?
- What’s that in their other hand? A bottle of Champagne! Where is this going…
- Oh god. I’m about to get sprayed by Champagne at best, glass at worst?
- That was cool.
- What ‘genius’ decided that hacking the neck off a glass bottle of expensive highly pressurized liquid was a good idea?
So who was the ‘genius’ to first sabre a bottle of Champagne?
You may have heard it was Napoléon Bonaparte who first put sword to
bottle, back in the days following the French Revolution. Or perhaps it
was the officers in his cavalry – celebrating some great victory by
bashing open a bottle of bubbly atop a horse. Maybe you heard the
alternate version of that story, that following a defeat in battle, a
bitter solider cleaved the head off a Champagne bottle to drink away his
misery. After all, it was Napoléon who (supposedly) said:
“Champagne! In victory one deserves it; in defeat one needs it.”
A more romantic twist involves those same officers and Madame
Clicquot, the young widow who had inherited her husband’s Champagne
house when she was twenty-seven.
Are any of the stories you might have heard true? Perhaps none of
them are. Perhaps they all are – in other words, no one person invented
sabering. If that’s the case then you can embrace the origin myth that
you like. Champagne is steeped in traditions and myths that contribute
to the undeniably celebratory mood that popping a bottle of bubbly
inspires. Just because Dom Pérignon didn’t actually ‘invent’ Champagne,
by accident no less, doesn’t make the story any less magical, especially
his quote:
“Come quickly, I am drinking the stars.”
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