Читать книгу The Wine Etiquette Guide - Your Defense Against Wine Snobbery - Chuck Blethen - Страница 12

Here's to the corkscrew - a useful key to unlock the storehouse of wit, the treasury of laughter, the front door of fellowship, and the gate of pleasant folly.

- W.E.P. French (From the wine list of Commander's Palace in New Orleans, Louisiana)

There are three types of corkscrews on the market that are worth having – the screw pull (also called the rabbit), the Ah So corkscrew, and the waiter’s corkscrew.

The screw pull is the fastest and easiest to use. Simply clamp the neck of the bottle in the grips of the screw pull and lift the lever. In one motion the cork is removed from the wine bottle. There are very fancy models that can cost several hundred dollars that are mounted on platforms and are used as a stationary wine bottle opener.

The Ah So corkscrew is useful when you have a cork that is very old or crumbling. It is a 2-pronged device that you slip down along the side of the cork and the inside of the bottle. Then use a slow turning and pulling motion to remove the stubborn cork.

The waiter’s corkscrew is the most popular one that you see in restaurants. It has a foil cutter to remove the capsule as well as the long spiral to screw into the cork. It has a leveraged handle that is applied against the lip of the bottle and gently pulled to remove the cork.

Buy only these three, learn to use them, and leave the others in the storage tray in the garage. A good corkscrew will have a minimum of five full twists in the screw. A very interesting piece of wine trivia is that, as of 2004, 80% of American households did not own a corkscrew.

Their reluctance (or refusal) to purchase a corkscrew may be timely since wineries worldwide are making the change over to screw-cap closures. And we are seeing more “chateau cardboard” wines – wines packaged in a box with spigots. Eventually there will be no need for a corkscrew.

Foil cutters come in many shapes and sizes, but their function is the same – to cleanly cut the foil covering (capsule) on a bottle of wine so it can be poured easily and cleanly into a glass.