The toasts after The Brown Palace’s annual champagne cascade last only a minute, but Dennis Dinsmore and his crew put in a good eight hours to build the tower of glasses that the bubbly flows down.
Dinsmore constructed the 14-foot-tall, 5,600-glass tower for 20 years. “All you need is patience, a good plan, a lot of aspirin and perseverance,” he says.
Dinsmore and his son, Mat, are partners in Wilbur’s Total Beverage in Fort Collins. They bowed out of the tower construction this year because the annual brunch was moved to the Saturday before Thanksgiving, the liquor store’s busiest day.
Dinsmore learned the art of building towers of champagne glasses in 1986 when he worked for a division of Moet & Chandon, and helped build a world-record tower in Las Vegas.
“The biggest problem is making sure no one dies,” the jovial liquor salesman says in all seriousness. “If glasses break and a person has cuts all over, there’s no way the paramedics are going to be able to stop all that bleeding.”
The tower begins on a custom-built, perfectly level platform. Dinsmore calculates how many of the hotel’s glasses are required for the base, and inspects them all to make sure they are identical. Variations as small as one-sixteenth of an inch can throw off the whole thing.
Then he starts stacking.
He’s gotten four of five rows up and realized something was off, forcing him to start all over. He’s also knocked out a corner and watched hundreds of glasses avalanche down one side.
“By the time you get to the top, you’re shaking,” he says. Some years, they lose up to 100 glasses, but last year they broke only 20, says Mat Dinsmore.
The top two layers are Baccarat crystal flutes. This year, pouring honors went to Marcel Pitton, the hotel’s managing director. The Nutcracker Prince from Colorado Ballet raised the top glass to toast the holiday season. The champagne is not actually served from the tower, as removing glasses would cause it to topple.
Does he get any sleep the night before? “I usually have dreams the night after I do it,” Dinsmore says. But he takes comfort in the fact that his masterpiece is protected by a 24-hour security guard.
Tips: Don’t try this at home! But, here are Dinsmore’s picks for sipping: Sainte Hillaire semi-sweet for a killer mimosa; Veuve Clicquot for affordable drinking; and a 1.5-liter bottle of Moet & Chandon Brut Imperial, for savoring.
Kristen Browning-Blas
