A group of Italian champagne lovers is gearing up for a public performance of the delicate Napoleonic art of decapitating bottles of bubbly.
Led by winemaker Gianluca Bisol, the group will gather in the northern town of Treviso at the weekend to display their skill at opening champagne bottles by slicing off the top with a sabre.
The technique, known as 'sabrage', dates back to the Napoleonic era when legend has it that Napoleon and his generals would celebrate their conquests by beheading champagne bottles with a graceful swoop of the sword before downing the contents.
Modern masters of sabrage use their sabre to cut through a chilled Champagne bottle just below the cork at the weakest point along the glass seam in the bottle.
Bisol became so enamoured of the ritual that he joined the Confrerie du Sabre d'Or (the Brotherhood of the Golden Sabre), a fraternity founded in France in 1986 which now has more than 30,000 members in 12 different countries.
New Italian members will be inducted during the Treviso gathering, when they will be required to successfully sabre a bottle before being named knights of the brotherhood.
