| Comments | Transcript



Mike Supple from SuppleWine.com demonstrates the steps for opening a bottle of wine with a standard waiter's corkscrew.
Download the Podcast

Transcript

Mike: I'm Mike Supple with SuppleWine.com, and today I'm going to show you how to open a bottle with a simple waiter's corkscrew. It's your most common type of corkscrew that we have right here.

There are some slight variations in the corkscrews, but all waiter's corkscrews generally have some kind of a knife. This is used for cutting the foil capsule off the top of the bottle, exposing the cork. And they all have a hinged lever piece and what they call the worm - the screw that goes down into the cork. You use the hinged lever to rest on the edge of the bottle so you can get a little leverage in there and pull the cork out.

So let me just show you what you want to do. The easiest way - some people will argue whether you cut above the lip or below the lip - I find the easiest way is to cut below the lip. That's actually the way more Europeans cut it, which is easier and cleaner. You just prop the blade against that lip and slide, turning the bottle around, and you get a nice clean cut. It also gives you this nice lip for when you're pouring. This lip was actually designed for a reason. It can hold one drip of wine, which just helps you drip less while you're pouring.

To get the corkscrew in there, it helps to open it as wide as you can. And basically you want to think of the screw as a straw. You don't want to put the tip in the middle of the cork. You want to place it as if the worm was a solid straw instead of a screw, you'd want to put the middle of that in the middle of the cork. So essentially you put the tip a little bit to the side, not dead center, but a little bit to the edge, so the center of the screw is in the center of the cork. Put it in there and start twisting. Just twist it on down. Go ahead and keep twisting it all the way through.

Once you're in, what you want to do next is prop the lever against the glass lip. This is a two-stage waiter's corkscrew, so it has two ledges you can catch on the bottle to make it a little bit easier for you. Put the first notch on the bottle and pull up. Then do it again with the second one and ease the cork on up, and you're all set. You've opened your bottle of wine.