You have a bottle of red wine sitting in the kitchen and you are just about ready to settle down and enjoy it and you discover that you can't find the corkscrew.
You can almost taste that first bitter tang of tannin blended with a little oak, and smell all those wonderful berry fruit aromas. Blackcurrant and raspberry tickles your palette and you can feel it sliding down your throat, but you can't get at it. You can see it through the glass, glinting at you.
Is this some form of slow torture, you ask yourself.
What can you next?
You could take a screw driver and dig the cork out but you would end up with little bits of cork in the wine. A tea strainer, or fine sieve would come in useful here, just won't taste the same after you have had to go to all that trouble.
Maybe you could drill a hole in the cork and insert a straw. This is an ideal solution for anyone enjoying a bottle of wine alone but it doesn't give you, or the wine, much time to breath.
You could place a blunt object over the cork and hit it with a hammer. This would push the cork into the bottle but every so often the cork bobs up into the neck of the bottle as you pour and makes the wine splutter out. You don't want to waste any, so this isn't very practical.
There is a very simple method that will remove the cork from a wine bottle (red, white, or rose).
- You will need a long screw, a screw driver and a claw hammer.
- Screw the screw into the cork. Screw it down as far as you can without going through the bottom of the cork as this will allow little bits of cork to get into the wine.
- Then take the claw side of the hammer and lever the cork out. It is really east to do. Just be careful that you don't get too energetic about it and crack the bottle.
