Beheading the Champagne: all the French grandeur applied to the bottle opening…   Champagne tastes and smells like France. You drink Champagne in a Flûte and probably you imagine that flute in the hand of a Femme Fatale. Moreover, of course, the Champagne is a region of France, where all the magic started.   And it is definitely French the most intriguing and exciting way to open a Champagne bottle: beheading it with a sabre in the sabrage ceremony! Champagne, French Revolution and Napoleon: it’s complicated…  The Champagne was made from blue blood people for blue blood people: so the French Revolution disrupted the Champagne production and market. Some great clients just… lost their heads, many others fled from France. The Champagne Maisons even tried to smuggle bottles out from France. But Napoleon wasn’t Robespierre: l’Empereur and his staff were far from being moderate! They loved good food and beverages as well as good art (the Gioconda, for example…). So they loved Champagne too. And drinking Champagne became a good way to celebrate the many victories of the Grande Armée.   But Marshals and Generals that were putting the whole Europe under their heel couldn’t just uncork the bottle: it was absolutely cooler to behead it with the sabre, the heavy cavalry saber, terror of Austrian, Prussian and Russian armies. With the 1812 Napoleon’s Russian campaign the luck of the French Emperor turned away from him. Nevertheless Champagne was in the middle of the action: the champagne merchant Charles-Henri Heidsieck followed the French Imperial Army in Russia, and he just started to sell his champagne to the Russians when the French started to  retreat, fighting both the Russian army and the terrible General Frost. Champagne and sabrage: from Napoleon to... Florence! The Napoleonic Empire is dead, but the sabrage is alive and well. At Enoteca Alessi, along our great selection of Champagne maisons, you can find also the sabrage saber. Just hit the neck of the bottle decisively, behead it and enjoy the Champagne gold bubbles to celebrate your own victories!