While some of you will be partying with pals or fighting crowds at clubs or in big cities, I will be enjoying a bottle of bubbly that I pick up at a wine tasting. Not just any wine tasting, though. This is the tasting where bottles are opened by shearing their frozen necks wide open with a saber.
Not a light saber. Not a fake saber. Not a corkscrew that looks like a saber. An honest to God, for real, totally legit saber.
This year we are using the cheaper alcohol, super-bubbly sparkling wine that packs an incredible pop when the corks fly off. It's all about the proper freezing of the bottles and finding the nearly-invisible bottle seams. Then, the proper technique needs to be employed, a one-two-three-BLAM motion that sends both the cork and part of the glass neck flying across the parking lot for every bottle we saber open.After opening the bottles (I watch and film -- my hand is too small to hold the bottle steadily), participants and spectators are knighted, and we polish off every single opened bubbly so the saberers (is that even a word?) can bring home their trophies.
I invite people to come with me, but they cannot wrap their heads around the experience and beg out. Wine tasting? Sabers? Drinking from bottles with sheared glass openings? They ask me questions like, "Is your insurance up to date? Does your policy cover glass shards ripping your insides from throat to intestine?" I am undaunted.
You are all so wrong and so, so, so very unlucky not to witness what I witness, not to participate, not to be officially knighted by the saber. (The honorable knighthood is bestowed with last year's long saber, whereas bottles are opened with this year's more efficient shorter, curved saber.) I briefly feel sorrow for those of you who miss the experience, but then I open the bubbly, start sipping, and I forget all about the plebeians who are out celebrating without having lived through the wine saber festivities.
Be safe out there, people. If I can drink from sheared bottles and live to tell about it, you can all be responsible and get yourselves and your loved ones home in one piece. Happy 2017, and saber on.
