In Ways of Seeing, John Berger describes a shift in Renaissance painting that still shapes everyday life.
Women ceased to appear simply within a story and began to be arranged for the gaze – posed, inspected, rendered with smooth skin and an idealised form. What began as convention hardened into norm. Over time, it no longer looked designed. It looked inevitable.
Once you see that pattern, you see it everywhere.
Wine did not become dominant because grapes were destined to be superior. They happened to sit in a rare natural balance: enough sugar to ferment cleanly, acids that stabilised the liquid, yeasts that thrived without intervention. In a pre-industrial world, that reliability mattered.
Other fruits could ferment, but less predictably. Some spoiled. Some stalled. Many required correction long before correction was possible. So one solution scaled. And once it scaled, it set the frame.
Today, there are thousands of edible fruits and tens of thousands of cultivated varieties. Yet shared taste has narrowed around a handful. Not because the rest lack flavour, but because the original constraint was never revisited.
Reliability became legitimacy.
Legitimacy became tradition.
Tradition became rule.
This is how systems persist.
It is also why certain questions remain strangely difficult to ask.
Why are grapes assumed to be the only legitimate fruit?
Why do we keep adapting inherited language – “non-alcoholic champagne” – for something with no precedent, rather than naming it properly: Cuvée Sablé?
And if taste can be redesigned, why not togetherness too?
These are not ideological questions.
They are design questions.
To question a rule is not to reject tradition, but to remember that every tradition was once invented.
The great Champagne styles are defined not only by grapes, but by a set of sensory outcomes: tension held in balance, aromatic layering, depth without weight, and an effervescence fine enough to carry flavour rather than mask it.
Cuvée Sablé begins there.
A new architecture of fine sparkling cuvées, composed from first principles at 0.0%.
Built in collaboration with winemakers, sensory scientists, technologists, chefs, sommeliers, designers and friends of the House, each cuvée is composed layer by layer.
Orchard fruit gives brightness and fruit backbone.
Selected tea leaves bring depth and phenolic length.
Early-pressed verjuice draws a clean line of tension.
Honey distillate carries aromatics without sweetness.
A proprietary carbonation platform yields a silken effervescence that lifts, integrates, and persists.
Each element has a structural role.
Nothing is there by accident.
The result is a family of fine sparkling cuvées at 0.0% – not adapted from an inherited category, but built as one of their own.
This is the work of the House of Sablière: widening what is possible in taste, in form, and in how we gather.