Tom Gilbey is a wine man, from a family of them, and he wanted a sabre for opening champagne. The interesting part of the brief was the part most people get wrong about sabrage.
A champagne sabre is not a sharp knife. The bottle does not open because the blade cuts it. It opens because the blade strikes the lip of the glass collar at the seam, and the pressure inside finishes the job. A sharpened edge adds nothing useful and a good deal of risk, both to the person holding it and to anyone nearby.
So we made it unsharpened by design. The weight, the balance and the line of the blade do the work; the edge is left deliberately blunt. It is a stranger thing to make than it sounds, because almost everything else about knife-making pulls in the opposite direction.
It is British steel, British oak and a red liner, built for a ritual rather than a kitchen.
Almost everything we know about knife-making is about putting an edge on steel. This was the one time the job was to leave it off.
In collaboration with Tom Gilbey.