The Wine Knows

Today, we published our 100th episode of the Northwest Winecast, our weekly video show that features the people and places of Northwest wine country. To celebrate, we decided to open a bottle of bubbly. With a saber.

Slicing the top off a bottle of sparkling wine is known as sabrage and dates back to the days of Napoleon and the French Revolution.

Fortunately for us, we had Harry McWatters around to demonstrate. Harry is president of Sumac Ridge Estate Winery in Summerland, B.C., and has been one of the forces behind the British Columbia wine industry for the past quarter century.

He's also been known to saber a bottle of bubbly now and then (well, more now than then). As he says in the video, Harry has used everything from a butter knife to a ski to open a bottle of sparkling wine. For our purposes he used what he calls an "Okanagan saber," which was a $12 machete I picked up at a home-improvement store.

Watch the video here: