Sabrage Champagne Sword

For those of you looking for a nifty BBQ trick, here is a special just for you. How to open a bottle of champagne or fizzy wine using a sword, or if you don’t have  a sword handy,  a kitchen knife! This is called Sabrage: The art of opening a bottle of champagne with a sword - it dates back to cavalry times!

A few safety tips first… Keep an eye on where the cork goes! You don’t want your pet, kid or elderly relative finding it and cutting themselves on the broken glass. Also, don’t try and hold the wine from the spout, it is sharp! And finally, only do this if you are a sensible adult… no really, this ain’t for kids to try on their own.

So let’s get started, for this you will need a bottle of champagne or fizzy wine (don’t worry, none gets wasted!), a willing volunteer and either a sword (not many people have these lying around any more) or a sturdy kitchen knife.

You will need to find the seam on the bottle of wine, as shown in the picture below.

Seam on Champagne

You need to then go outside, address your audience and carry out the following…

Slide the knife up the seam towards the cork to give you a guide on where you need to be aiming for. When you are confident that you have it sussed, give it a mighty slide up the seam towards the cork and strike the cork this time… hey presto, the top goes flying and you are a BBQ Party trick hero!

Here is a video of our friend Sophie trying it at a recent BBQ.

We tried a new Barbecue drink at our last grilling session. Sounds really simple but tasted flipping great. Fizzy white wine with strawberry juice and strawberries.

The one down side is how we found the new drink. As I remember it a small food fight developed into strawberries being lobbed about and one ended up in Granny BS’s fizzy wine. Her being a fine wine aficionado she could not put such a tainted drink upon her delicate pallet and it was duly despatched to me to be hovered up.

I tried to fish the strawberry out but only succeeded in squeezing the juice into the wine and plopping he fruit back in the glass. I gave up and took a sip… it was really nice.

I passed it round the Barbecue attendees and everyone agreed it was the way forward. Two seconds later we all had one. Sitting there drinking fizzy strawberry wine whilst the red wine smoking BBQ woodchips gently wafted under my nose was BBQ Heaven and another reason why I Love My BBQ!

This has now developed into a regular BBQ drink. Here is how we did it again, squeeze some fresh strawberries into some fizzy wine and then plop the strawberry into the glass. Next step, drink and repeat the process until you cannot walk properly.