Three alternative ways to open a bottle of wine
Huon Hooke in Three of a Kind Become a member to view this article
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Yes, there are ways to open a bottle of cork-sealed wine without a cork-extractor. Why bother, you ask?
I can think of a few reasons. You might be fishing in a boat a long way offshore and no-one remembered to bring a corkscrew. Or you may just want to impress others.
No doubt there are other prosaic reasons to use an alternative method. I’ve certainly used a wire coat-hanger in my more desperate youth. Most importantly, these three methods are fun.
Shock treatment – AKA the shoe method
Smack its bottom to make it cough up its cork. There are many YouTube videos of these techniques. Here’s one above.
Hold your bottle horizontally in one hand, and, holding your shoe by the front half, strike the base of the bottle with the flat heel. If you hit it hard enough, and squarely, the force will gradually push the cork out. Repeated blows will be needed.
If this fails, use the brick wall method. Place the base of the bottle inside the heel part of the shoe. Holding the bottle horizontally, and securely, bang the bottle squarely against a brick or stone wall using the shoe heel as a cushion. This is even more effective than the slapping method.
Tip: remove the capsule first!
Port tongs Flickr
Port tongs
Use port tongs to open a very old bottle.
Very old wines have frail, crumbly old corks. Portuguese vintage port has a very long lifespan, which means the cork is often impossible to remove in one piece – and the bottle has a neck-shape that can make extraction of a frail cork even trickier.
Port tongs completely bypass the need to extract the cork. You simply break the neck off the bottle and voilà ! Instant access to pristine wine.
The jaws of the port tongs are heated red-hot in a fire, then clamped onto the bottleneck just below the cork. Usually, the glass will immediately crack and the top of the neck will fall off, cork still in situ. Sometimes, you might need to apply a wet tea-towel and gently encourage the glass to snap. If you take care, there will be no fragments – in the wine or in your hands!
Champagne sabrage opening. Champagne Booking website
Sabrage
To open a sparkling wine with a sword or sabre.
Like the port tongs above, this traditional Champagne technique bypasses the need to extract the cork. It only works with sparkling wines because it relies on the bottle’s internal pressure.
Very carefully, and ideally wearing gloves and eye protection, and taking care to point the bottle well away from yourself and others, you quickly slide the blunt edge of the sabre down the neck of the bottle so that it strikes the bottle’s lip, with or without the cage still intact, sharply. If executed correctly, it results in the glass breaking in a neat ring around the bottle lip, without splintering, and the gas pressure expels the top of the bottle-neck complete with cork and cage, for several metres. Pre-chill the bottle to minimise frothing and loss of wine.
Again, there are YouTube videos of this.
Special blunt sabres are available, especially for this purpose. It’s a great party trick.
Nice one. The cork might need to be quite soft for that to work.
An alternative, that takes skill and practice, involves a serviette. You make a cone out of a corner of the serviette, cup the cork inside it, and yank it out. The harder you yank the serviette, the more tightly it grips the cork.
A chopstick is useful if the cork falls in or if don’t have a corkscrew. Push in the cork with chopstick if it’s not already pushed in. Then wedge the cork in the neck with the chopstick. Then pull out the chopstick and the cork should come with it.