Nobody Was Drinking the Stars: How to Saber Sparkling Wine and Why It Works

Before anyone could open sparkling wine with a sword, somebody had to build a bottle that would not blow up on its own. The story starts with the English navy running short of oak, passes through one of wine’s most famous myths, and ends with a controlled fracture.

The reason you can open a bottle of sparkling wine with a sword begins with a shortage of trees.

Not with Napoleon. Not with a monk. With oak.

In 1615, James I issued a proclamation forbidding the use of wood as fuel in glass furnaces. The reasoning came straight out of a naval budget meeting. English oak was needed for shipbuilding, glassworks were consuming timber at a rate the Crown found alarming, and the proclamation pointed out that glass could be made with coal instead. So the furnaces switched.

That decree was written to protect a navy. It helped make modern sparkling wine possible.

Coal-fired furnaces could sustain the higher temperatures needed to work heavier, stronger bottle glass. The technology was already developing before the proclamation, but the ban accelerated it and pushed English glassworks toward the coal fields. English bottles started coming out thick and dark, and on the continent they picked up a name: verre anglais.

Thick enough, it turned out, to hold something inside them that very much wanted out.

The most improbable man in the history of the wine bottle

Sir Kenelm Digby was born in 1603 and packed about four lives into sixty-two years.

His father was executed when Kenelm was three for his part in the Gunpowder Plot with Guy Fawkes, which is not a promising start at court. He grew up in love with Venetia Stanley, a childhood friend his mother did not want him to marry, so in 1619 she sent him abroad.

This is where the biography starts sounding like something Digby might have made up.

By his own later account, the seventeen-year-old Digby attracted the attention of Marie de’ Medici, Queen Mother of France, a woman twenty-eight years his senior. Her interest became difficult enough to escape that he arrived at an unusual solution.

He died.

Or rather, he let France believe he had. Digby used unrest around the town of Angers to spread word that he had been killed, and got himself out of the country. He wrote home to tell Venetia the reports were false. His mother, still opposed to the match, intercepted the letters.

So Venetia thought he was dead.

Most of that story comes from Digby himself, written years later as a romance with the names changed, in which he plays the hero and the queen plays the danger. How much is history and how much is Kenelm Digby improving Kenelm Digby cannot be untangled now.

He came home alive, married Venetia in secret, and then went back out. In 1628, at twenty-four, he commanded a small fleet into the Mediterranean and fought French and Venetian ships at Scanderoon. He served as a diplomat. He promoted the Powder of Sympathy, a treatment applied not to the wounded man but to the weapon that wounded him. When Venetia died suddenly in 1633, he summoned Van Dyck to paint her before she was buried, then withdrew into books and a laboratory.

And around 1630, under license from the Mansell glass monopoly, he started running a glassworks at Newnham-on-Severn.

The story usually gets told as “Digby invented the modern wine bottle in 1662,” and that is close enough to be useful and wrong enough to be worth correcting. There was no invention in 1662. There was a lawsuit.

A Huguenot glassmaker named John Colnett tried to secure control over bottle making. Glassmakers who had worked for Digby challenged the claim. The Attorney General ruled against Colnett on the grounds that these bottles were no new invention and had been in trade and public use for nearly thirty years.

It does not hand Digby a patent. It tells us that strong English bottle glass already existed, had existed for decades, and that Digby’s operation was part of the world producing it.

Here is a man whose father tried to blow up Parliament, who claimed he faked his own death to escape a queen, who fought a naval battle as a privateer (a pirate with paperwork), who tried to heal wounds by medicating swords, who wrote himself into a romance, and who somehow ended up attached to one of the most consequential developments in the history of wine packaging.

He does not need us to improve the story.

Digby’s posthumous recipe book, The Closet Opened, reads at times like an early manual for managing pressure. It tells readers to use strong bottles, to tie the corks down, to keep bottled drinks cool, and in one recipe to deliberately delay bottling “to avoid the breaking of the Bottles.” Another warns that renewed fermentation may require venting before the glass gives way.

That is a man who understood exactly what he was containing.

He died in 1665. Whatever share of the credit belongs to him personally, the English glass trade he worked inside had learned to build a container that could keep carbon dioxide from escaping.

Which turned out to be the whole ballgame.

Bubbles were never the hard part

Bubbles are easy. Yeast eats sugar and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide. Any wine that ferments produces carbon dioxide, all of it, every time.

Keeping the gas in the wine is the hard part. In an open vessel it simply escapes.

On December 17, 1662, an English physician named Christopher Merrett read a paper to the young Royal Society describing what wine coopers in London were already doing. They were adding sugar and molasses to wine to make it brisk and sparkling.

Not fixing a fault. Not surviving an accident. Doing it on purpose, as a commercial practice.

That is deliberate sparkling-wine production described in writing, six years before Dom Pérignon arrived in Champagne.

English merchants had strong bottle glass, cork closures, and a written description of deliberately making wine sparkle, before Champagne had assembled those things into a reliable process.

What Dom Pérignon actually did

Here is where I have to take something away from you.

Dom Pierre Pérignon was real. He arrived at the Abbey of Hautvillers in 1668 as cellar master and stayed until his death in 1715. He was, by every account we have, an extraordinary winemaker.

He did not invent Champagne. He was not blind. And he never said the line.

The myth accumulated in stages. More than a century after Pérignon died, a former Hautvillers cellar master helped build the legend that he had invented sparkling Champagne. By the late nineteenth century, Champagne advertising had supplied him with the sentence everybody remembers: “Come quickly, I am drinking the stars.” There is no contemporary evidence that he ever said it.

It is a beautiful line. It is also marketing copy with a very long head start.

The deeper irony is what his actual job involved.

When Pérignon arrived at Hautvillers, uncontrolled bubbles were a problem. Fermentation could stall in the cold northern autumn, the wine would be bottled while it still held sugar and live yeast, and spring warmth would restart it inside sealed glass. The French had names for the results. Vin du diable, the devil’s wine. Also saute-bouchon, cork jumper.

The problem was never learning how to make carbon dioxide. Wine had been doing that forever. The problem was learning to control it.

Pérignon spent much of his career working toward more stable, more predictable, better wine, while around him Champagne was beginning to discover that controlled effervescence might be something people wanted on purpose.

What he genuinely accomplished is more interesting than the myth. He harvested in the cool of early morning and sorted fruit rigorously. He kept yields down. He worked out how to press black grapes quickly and gently enough to draw clear white juice, which is why Pinot Noir sits in white sparkling wine four centuries later. The same principle decides the color of Pinot Grigio, where the fruit is pink and the wine is not. He blended across parcels and villages to build a wine better than any single vineyard could make, which is still the architecture of Champagne today.

He was a great winemaker who is famous for a sentence he did not say about a thing he was trying to prevent.

I find that more human than the legend.

Every item on that list is a judgment call somebody still has to make by hand, including the ones we make every August.

The cellars that exploded

Before the strong bottle reached France, cellars were genuinely dangerous places.

One weak bottle fails. The shock and the flying glass take out a neighbor. That one takes out two more. Accounts of the period describe cellar losses that would end a modern business, alongside persistent legends of workers wearing heavy iron masks to protect themselves from flying glass. I have not found a primary source for the masks, and the picture my head supplies is Leonardo DiCaprio in The Man in the Iron Mask, which is not evidence of anything. The underlying problem is beyond dispute. People were storing an uncontrolled chemical reaction inside containers that could not hold it.

Compare that to what is sitting in your refrigerator.

A modern Champagne bottle is designed to withstand roughly 20 bar, about 290 pounds per square inch, according to the Comité Champagne. That is around three times Champagne’s natural pressure.

The bottle stopped being the weak point.

And once the bottle stopped being the weak point, somebody was always going to hit one with a sword.

Then the cavalry, probably

Sabrage is traditionally credited to Napoleonic cavalry officers, the hussars in particular. The stories are wonderful and mutually contradictory. Officers opening bottles from horseback because you cannot manage a corkscrew with reins in one hand. Officers performing the trick to impress the young widow Clicquot. Napoleon delivering the line about deserving Champagne in victory and needing it in defeat, which no one has ever traced to Napoleon.

The tradition is real and the attribution is fog. The legends are far easier to find than any document naming the first person who did it.

So I will leave the first saber where it belongs, somewhere in the smoke of the early 1800s, in the hand of a cavalryman who had a bottle strong enough to survive being carried into a war and enough confidence to introduce it to his blade.

What we can explain with much more confidence is why it works now.

You are not cutting the bottle: the physics of sabrage

The bottle in my hand is not the bottle a cavalry officer held two hundred years ago. Bottle manufacturing changed dramatically over the nineteenth century. Henry Ricketts patented an important three-piece mold in England in 1821, but those early molded bottles did not necessarily carry the continuous seam we rely on today. So I am not going to project the modern technique backward and pretend I know exactly where a hussar struck a bottle in 1810.

What modern manufacturing gives us is consistency.

Run your fingers up the side of a bottle of traditional-method sparkling wine. You will find a faint vertical ridge running from the base toward the neck, and a matching one on the opposite side.

Those are mold seams, left where the two halves of the mold met. Not a join where two halves of glass were stuck together. The bottle is formed in one piece, and the seam is only the mark the mold leaves behind.

Follow one of them all the way to the top. It runs into the heavy ring of glass just below the cork, called the lip or annulus.

That junction is the entire target.

The strike point is where the mold seam meets the lip. The blade travels along the seam, spine flat against the glass.

Glass is enormously strong in compression and pathetic at handling concentrated stress at a flaw. The seam is a line of built-in irregularity. The lip is a thick collar with an abrupt change in geometry. Where they meet, you have a stress concentration point already built into the bottle by accident.

A saber slid along the seam and driven into that junction delivers a sharp mechanical shock exactly where the glass is least able to distribute it. A crack starts and runs around the neck.

The blade never cuts anything. A proper Champagne saber is not sharp, and does not need to be. It works through mass and momentum, the same way a center punch starts a hole in steel.

Then the wine takes over.

Why you chill the bottle, and the part almost everyone explains backward

You will read that you chill the bottle because cold glass is more brittle, but glass has no ductile-to-brittle transition anywhere near the temperatures in your kitchen. Unlike steel, which really does get more fracture-prone in the cold, glass is brittle at 70°F and brittle at 40°F. Moving a bottle from the counter to the ice bucket does not meaningfully change how the glass breaks.

You will also read that chilling raises the pressure, giving the cork more shove. That is backward too.

Carbon dioxide is more soluble in cold liquid. Chill the wine and more of the gas stays dissolved, which means less of it is loose in the headspace pushing on the cork. Researchers at Reims measured this precisely. Headspace pressure in a sealed Champagne bottle runs around 4.5 bar at 5°C, roughly 7.5 bar at 20°C, and past 10 bar at 30°C. Leave a bottle in a hot car and it will climb well beyond anything the wine generates in a cellar.

A warm bottle is not a better bottle to saber. It is a more dangerous one, with half again the pressure and a wine primed to erupt through the opening the instant you make one.

So why chill it at all?

Because the goal was never maximum force. At 6 to 8°C there is still plenty of pressure behind the cork to send the collar clear once the fracture starts. What you have given up is the violence. The wine stays in the bottle instead of coming out of it, and the whole event stays inside the range where you are in charge of it.

Cold is not what breaks the bottle. Cold is what keeps the break polite.

What MCC means, and why our bubbles come from South Africa

One more thing has to happen before we get to the bottle in front of us.

The method Merrett described and Champagne spent two centuries systematizing has a name in English: the traditional method. Second fermentation in the sealed bottle, time on the lees, the whole slow business. What it does not have is one name everybody is allowed to use, because Champagne is a place, and the word is protected. So the same method carries a different name almost everywhere it travels. Crémant in the rest of France. Cava in Spain. In South Africa, Cap Classique.

That story starts in 1968, when a Stellenbosch winemaker named Frans Malan visited Champagne and came home convinced the Cape could do it. He built his own riddling racks, made a bottle-fermented sparkling wine from the 1971 harvest, and released it in 1973 as Kaapse Vonkel, Cape Sparkle. He made it from Chenin Blanc, because Chenin was what the Cape had a great deal of.

The name came later. South Africa could not label a wine Champagne or méthode champenoise, so in 1992 a group of producers formed the Cap Classique Producers Association and settled on Méthode Cap Classique, usually shortened to MCC. It is not a marketing synonym for sparkling wine. It is a category with rules: the second fermentation happens in the bottle it will be sold in, and the wine spends a minimum of twelve months on the lees before release.

Which is to say a South African MCC and a bottle of Champagne are made the same way. What differs is the ground the fruit grew on and the century the industry started in.

Two of the four wines in our Bubbles Tasting are MCC, one from Stellenbosch and one from Paarl. They are in the flight because South Africa is where our own story starts.

They are also, mechanically, the reason any of this works. Bottle-fermented sparkling wine means real pressure, which means a bottle built to contain it.

Which brings us back to the sword.

How sabrage works, and how we do it at Coordinates

Done correctly, sabrage is controlled and repeatable. It is not risk-free.

Almost nothing that makes sabrage safe happens at the moment of the strike. It happens in the preparation, which is why this is something we set up in advance rather than something we improvise at the bar.

Here is how we run it.

The bottle. A sound bottle built for sparkling wine, inspected before anyone picks it up. No chip, no crack, no scuffed lip, nothing that has been frozen. A damaged bottle is a compromised pressure vessel and it does not go in anybody’s hand. Large formats hold considerably more stored energy and take much longer to reach temperature, so magnums and the 3L are sabered with more notice and by our staff.

The chill. Six to eight degrees Celsius, the whole bottle, not just the neck. An ice and water bath moves heat far faster than cold air does. This is the step people skip, and by everything in the section above, it is the step that decides whether the result is controlled or violent. It is also why we ask for advance notice.

The flight path. Outdoors, or into a wide clear space with several meters of nothing in it. No people, no pets, no windows, no cars, no glassware in front of us. Everyone else stands well outside the path. Once the bottle is pointed at the safe zone, it stays pointed there, much like a loaded gun.

The cage. This is where a lot of internet advice goes wrong. We do not strip the muselet off and set it aside. We keep control of the cork throughout, moving the cage and re-securing it, so that a pressurized cork is never held in place by friction alone while hands are working around it. Nobody’s face goes over the top of the bottle. The bottle is not shaken.

The seam. Rotate the bottle so one of the mold seams faces up, and follow it to the heavy ring of glass below the cork. That junction is the target. Not the cork, not the middle of the neck.

The stroke. The bottle is held near the base, well away from the neck, angled 30 to 45 degrees upward, cork pointed downrange. The blade is laid spine-flat along the seam and travels in one smooth stroke through the lip, following all the way through past the rim. It is not a chop, and hitting harder is not the answer. Speed is not the variable that matters. The line is. If a bottle does not open, we stop and inspect it rather than striking it again, because a chipped lip or a partial crack has just made everything less predictable.

Afterward. Never drink directly from the neck of a sabered bottle. That rim is broken glass, and it will cut you given the chance. We inspect the fracture, let the first of the wine clear the opening, and pour into glasses. The outward rush may help carry loose material away, but it does not guarantee that the wine is free of glass, which is why the inspection is not optional. If the break is irregular, or there is any concern at all about the glass, the bottle is discarded.

That is the whole of it. One second of blade, and a great deal of preparation.

The sword comes last

There is something gloriously excessive about opening wine with a sword, and I understand why the cavalry got to keep the story.

But the cavalry only gets to be interesting because of everything stacked underneath them.

A king protecting his oak forests. Furnaces switched to coal. An English privateer with a glassworks and a laboratory. A physician reading a paper about sugar and molasses to a room full of natural philosophers. A monk in Champagne doing careful, brilliant work in the opposite direction. Two centuries of cellars learning what pressure does to glass, mostly the hard way.

Only after all of that could somebody afford to break a bottle on purpose.

We saber at Coordinates often enough that it has its own rhythm. It usually comes at the end of a tasting, and the only thing we ask for is lead time.

Not because the stroke is difficult. Because the bottle has to be genuinely cold first, and there is no way to hurry that. Ask on your way out the door and the honest answer is that the wine is not ready. Tell us when you book and it will be.

The preparation is the technique. The sword is the last second of it.

What I think about while a bottle sits chilling: five atmospheres of pressure made by carbon dioxide inside that glass, wanting out, staying put only because of four centuries of somebody else’s engineering.

Glass. Carbon dioxide. Temperature. Pressure. One weak point.

Understand those five and the sword becomes the least impressive part of the trick.

It is not remarkable because someone hit a bottle with a sword.

It is remarkable because they barely had to.