The Etyeki Kúria pulled off a super-cool birthday toast

You don’t have to use a sword to perform a sabrage—people have tried it with the blade of a skate, a cell phone, a glass, but with an airplane wing—or more precisely, a sword attached to an airplane wing—hardly!
Cover photo: Etyeki Kúria & Márk Somay

A hair-raising stunt

Opening a bottle of sparkling wine with an airplane wing is pretty cool, and now aerobatic pilot Péter Besenyei has actually done it, for the first time in the world. The bottle was just 1.4 metres from the ground, which is dangerous, of course, because you have to get so close to the ground that one wrong move could send the plane crashing into the earth—and at 190 km/h, that doesn’t leave much chance of survival.

Besenyei didn’t give up

The daring maneuver nearly succeeded on the first try: at first, the wing (with the attached sword) of the plane sliced off the cork. The second time, it hit the bottle squarely, shattering it into pieces, but the third attempt went quite well, this time Besenyei sliced off the neck of the bottle so cleanly that if the bottom of the bottle hadn’t tipped over from the momentum, the sparkling wine could have been drunk without any trouble—with such a powerful cut, there are no shards. I admit, I didn’t believe that there were only the three attempts shown in the video, but Judit Schóber, the marketing manager at Etyeki Kúria, confirmed that yes, indeed, there were only those three attempts, and in exactly the order we see in the video. And regarding the perfection of the sabrage, Judit wrote this: “On the third try, he hit it perfectly right where he needed to. You can see in the photo (above) just how precise it was. The neck of the bottle still broke off, and the sabrage itself wasn’t as elegant as when, say, our winemaker, Sándor Mérész, does it with the base of the glass, and only the rim around the neck breaks off. But we calculated that 2 tons of force were exerted on the bottle, so this is no surprise. Probably at 190 km/h—with a plane this big, you can’t really expect much more elegance than that. We considered it a success.”