Swashbuckling sommelier

Sparkling wines poured at Saturday’s Tete de Cuvee Champagne tasting topped out at the Krug “Clos du Mesnil” 2003, priced at — wait for it — $1,000 a bottle.

With 12 such premium wines up for tasting, the opening of the bottles demanded a sense of ceremony. Enter master sommelier Robert Viernes and his borrowed sword, or rather, saber.

Following the practice of sabrage, which dates to the time of Napoleon, Viernes ran the sword along the seam of each bottle, cleanly popping off the top of the neck, with the cork still sealed within the glass.

Under the physics of sabrage, the pressure trapped inside a bottle of champagne creates a mini explosion when the sword creates even a minute crack in the glass.

If you are brave enough to try this at home you can buy your own Champagne saber. Just Google it.

The sake-yoga connection

The TY KU sake line bills itself as “the official drink of apres yoga.” Should yoga really have an official alcoholic beverage? Certainly, says Michele O’Dell, a TY KU representative who mixed the drinks for a light post-yoga brunch on Saturday.

“Apres” in this sense refers to a period of socialization after a yoga session leaves you all relaxed and meditative. O’Dell said the drinks — such as cucumber-flavored sake with soda water and lemon juice — represent “a lighter choice in cocktails.”

“You unwind after yoga without undoing your workout,” she said.

But first, about 50 participants stretched and toned in a 60-minute yoga session, perhaps as penance for the indulgences of the festival’s many dining events.

No easy cheese

Crottin is one of the hardest cheeses to make, said Dick Threlfall, but he does just that as owner of Hawaii Island Goat Dairy.

His Kalehua Crottin, an assertive, fruity and creamy product, starts with milk, to which mold and fat are added before aging. The exterior is coated in an ash made especially for cheese, then stored in a “cheese cave” and turned over every day until it’s ready. The dairy produces 90 crottin a week.

Why ash?

“It changes the surface pH so mold can grow,” said Threlfall. “It allows the mold inside to grow better.”

Applying the fine-powdered ash isn’t the easiest task, requiring gloves and a special container to confine the substance. Threlfall learned this the hard way, when he found himself sneezing ash after his first attempt at making crottin.

Since then, Threlfall’s version has won third place in an American Cheese Society competition. He believes his company is the only one in the state producing crottin.

Hawaii Island Goat Dairy makes its cheese in Honokaa with the milk of about 125 goats it raises there.

The best in caviar

The Halekulani hosted “Caviar & Champagne” Thursday, a tasting of four of the world’s most illustrious Champagnes paired with French Sturia caviar for a most decadent and educational experience.

Due to prohibitive prices, restaurants typically offer caviar as an embellishment for other food, so it’s rare to have a tasting like this, where all the focus is on the caviar itself.

With each sampling, presented on mother-of-pearl spoons to avoid the reactive effects of a metal spoon, tasters were able to gauge the texture, saltiness, iodine, fishiness and nuttiness of the sturgeon roe, discerning differences among styles.

Sturia Vintage, Primeur, Grand Chef and rare Oscietra Grand Cru, were paired with, respectively, Cristal Louis Roederer 2006, Salon Blanc de Blancs Le Mesnil Brut 2002, Moët & Chandon Dom Pérignon 2004, and Krug Grande Cuvée.

To find out more, visit Nadine Kam’s “Take A Bite” blog at honolulupulse.com/takeabite.

Classic cocktail turned upside down

Chicago mixologist Adam Seger channeled his inner mad scientist to produce an Upside Down Margarita for Saturday’s “Corks & Forks” event at Hawai‘i Convention Center.

He “flipped the Earth upside down” from Mexico, home of tequila, and took inspiration from Southeast Asia.

The result was a crowd-pleasing drink flavored with fresh coconut water, lemon, yuzu, galangal (young ginger), a housemade tamarind-jaggery (cane sugar) syrup and kaffir lime leaves, finished with local red alae salt.

It had Seger working all evening as lines of guests returned again and again.

Color me bee-utiful

A beekeeping certification program that Lorna Tsutsumi runs out of the University of Hawaii at Hilo has students creating value-added products with honey they harvested themselves.

These include strawberry and lilikoi creamed honeys, lotions and soaps. But probably the cutest product is bees-wax crayons, tiny pieces of colored wax shaped like honeycombs that come in four colors.

They are distributed to preschool groups along with a drawing to color for the program’s educational outreach to the community.

Taste of the arts

When Big Island arts advocate Tiffany DeEtte Shafto was wrapping up her coffee table book, “Aloha Expressionism by Contemporary Hawai‘i Artists” (Contemporary Publications, $59.95) that she wrote with Lynda McDaniel, she realized it carried the same theme as the Hawai‘i Food & Wine Festival.

“The slogan for the festival is ‘Taste our love of the land,’ and in our book, you can feel the love of the land,” she said. “I put together this book because I wanted to show the joy of some of the works being presented here. The world could use more joy these days.”

So Shafto approached festival director Denise Yamaguchi, who welcomed an art exhibit and silent auction to Saturday’s Corks & Forks event.

Shafto brought 40 works by some of the 50 of the artists in her book.

“The festival does so much good,” she said. “Hawaii Regional Cuisine is the perfect model for the arts to follow.”

Books are available at alohaexpressionism.com, amazon.com and will soon hit local galleries and Costco.