En Garde, Fizzy Bubbles

It was the late ‘80s, and Jeroen Gerrese had a hot first date. When the woman arrived at his apartment for dinner, Gerrese stepped onto the balcony, asking his date to remain behind the glass doors. Then, with a flourish of his Napoleonic replica sword, Gerrese swept the top off a waiting Champagne bottle, the intact stopper coming to rest a few feet away. Gerrese poured two glasses. Not long after, the woman became his wife.

Gerrese, 47, was introduced to “sabering” in 1985 by Robert Gourdin, then vice president of the importer for Moet & Chandon. Gourdin had sabered several bottles at the opening of a Washington, D.C., hotel, where Gerrese was food and beverage manager. “I loved it from the first moment,” says Gerrese, who is now general manager of the Laguna Cliffs Marriott Resort in Dana Point. Gerrese persuaded Gourdin to be his teacher. “Like, 60 bottles later,” he had more or less mastered the technique.

Legend dates sabering to the glory days of Napoleon. “When he and his troops came back from war on their horses,” Gerrese says, “their loved ones would stand waiting in the villages [holding out] Champagne.” The soldiers simply grabbed their weapons and opened the bottles in one grandiloquent swoop.

Gerrese belongs to the invitation-only national Moet & Chandon-sponsored Club des Sabreurs. The 37 members, who include Julia Child and George Hamilton, receive replicas of the nearly 3-foot-long Napoleonic sword housed in the Louvre. They get together about once a year and participate in charitable events.

“It looks fairly simple,” says restaurateur Jimmy Murphy, also a saberer. “But you have to hit that bottle at a certain point. You can’t just hack at it. At the last second, you give a little twist to the wrist.”

And sabering is not without risk. After all, says Gerrese, who has accumulated a few scars on his thumb. “Every square inch of a bottle of Champagne contains 100 pounds of pressure,” he says. “People have died. There was a restaurateur in Paris. A piece of glass hit an artery in his neck and he bled to death.”

Several years back, Gerrese was sabering a salmanazar (an oversized bottle holding the equivalent of 12 standard bottles) for a New Year’s Eve celebration at a New York hotel. “I’m at the top of a six-story staircase, with probably 500 people downstairs,” he says. “I sabered the big bottle and it exploded, totally. I thought I was dead. Ten minutes later, I had them bring out another bottle. This time the Champagne went up 30, 40 feet in the air. Afterward, my wife said, ‘It’s not worth dying over.’ All I know is, I just had to do it again.”