Of course, we are talking about those real bottles of wine that are still closed with a cork stopper. Unfortunately, many bottles today are closed with a metal cap. Some with plastic fake cork. And wine in a tetrapak is also available… without comment.
So to open classic bottles we need a corkscrew.
The Cambridge Dictionary records it as – a device for removing corks from bottles, that consists of a handle with a twisted metal rod to push into the cork and pull it out.
Corkscrews have a long history.
Its design may have derived from the gun worm which was a device used by men to remove unspent charges from a musket’s barrel in a similar fashion, from at least the early 1630s
The corkscrew is possibly an English invention, due to the tradition of beer and cider, and Treatise on Cider by John Worlidge in 1676 describes “binning of tightly corked cider bottles on their sides”, although the earliest reference to a corkscrew is, “steel worm used for the drawing of Corks out of Bottles” from 1681.
In 1795, the first corkscrew patent was granted to the Reverend Samuel Henshall, in England. The clergyman affixed a simple disc, now known as the Henshall Button, between the worm and the shank. The disk prevents the worm from going too deep into the cork, forces the cork to turn with the turning of the crosspiece, and thus breaks the adhesion between the cork and the neck of the bottle. The disk is designed and manufactured slightly concave on the underside, which compresses the top of the cork and helps keep it from breaking apart.
In its traditional form, a corkscrew is simply a steel screw attached to a perpendicular handle, made of wood or some other material. The user grips the handle and screws the metal point into the cork, until the helix is firmly embedded, then a vertical pull on the corkscrew extracts the cork from the bottle. The handle of the corkscrew allows for a commanding grip to ease the removal of the cork.
And then there is a wide selection of various corkscrews.
And a person who collects corkscrews is a helixophile.
And what to do if you don’t have a corkscrew at hand. During my college years, I specialized in opening bottles. Some did this by simply pushing the cork into the bottle. But it always got stuck on the neck of the bottle and it was difficult to pour the wine into the glasses. Still others pierced the cork with a needle or something similar and poured it out piece by piece. But then there were bits of cork left in the wine and we also floated while drinking.
I took a bottle, a folded blanket, which I placed on the door frame. I tapped the bottom of the bottle gently on the blanket a few times and the cork miraculously popped out. When it crawled out about halfway, I pulled it all the way out with my hand. The only awkward thing was that we had to wait a bit for the wine to settle down…