Originally Posted by
Petrus
Nope. Done correctly there will be very little mess. If you master the technique the bottle will cut perfectly without any shards or extreme spill.
If you study a champagne bottle you will there is a seam along the side. Sliding the knife/sword/whatever really will hit the weakest point of the bottle (on the neck, just below the foil), resulting the pressure plus a little force from the weapon popping the top off cleanly. The most critical part is that no one should be standing in front of the bottle for at least 20-30 feet as the thing flying is a small sharp missile.
It took me a couple of tries to master...
I have tried this a few times and usually succeeded but I wouldn't class myself as having mastered it. And living in an apartment with nowhere obvious to shoot projectiles for 20-30 feet without them landing in the street/on someone's car/in someone else's apartment/etc does reduce the opportunity for ad-hoc experiments
For those that aren't clear about it, it isn't a question of swinging the sword against the bottle and slicing the top off - that would be very unlikely to work! - but of first removing all the foil (not just the top part, you need to remove all the foil around the neck), leaving the cage in place, then holding the bottle at about 45 degrees, laying the sword flat against the side of the bottle about where the little neck label is, and moving the sword smartly along the glass in the direction of the cork, keeping the sword on the glass as you do so, so that the edge of the sword strikes (hard) the ring of glass just below the cork. The sword doesn't have to be sharp as you aren't cutting the glass. The bottle will break just below that point, and the fracture will be very clean because of the pressure and the direction you are causing the glass to break.