Right, so I’m in a hotel room. I’ve got a wine bottle I want to open. I do not want to go anywhere, nor do I want to call the front desk seeing as how it’s outside room service hours. I do not have a corkscrew.
I have, in my possession:
Chopsticks, wooden, disposable
Nailclippers
A stell bottle opener of the “completely flat” type
A torch lighter (the hotel room is no smoking and fire alarmed though)
A sewing kit
A plastic fork
Various electronic equipment
A hairdryer
An electric kettle
A bathrobe
Some thick wire coat hangers
Keys
A couple disposable razors, hair combs and toothbrushes
and whatever other crap there’s in a hotel room.
I’ll check back in ten minutes to see if anybody has any brilliant suggestions, or if I open it before then.
I prefer not to push the cork in since that’s
a) Not the boy scout way
b) I don’t want to add any more corkiness to my cheap wine from… [checks] Chile! sigh
The coat hangers turned out to be too pliable, the cork shifted down and lost some men, but now it has a pin stuck in it that is too deep down the bottle to remove. The cork won’t go down further because of pressure issues. scratches head
All solutions I can come up with involve using fire.
If you can just remove all the air in the room, the normal pressure inside the bottle should force the cork out.
If that sounds too easy, my best suggestion would be to break the long horizontal wire of a coat hanger in half (jut bend it back and forth). Then rotate the two broken pieces in opposite directions to unwind the part at the top where the two ends are twisted together; the part that doesn’t have the hook on it should be pretty much a ready-made corkscrew. I’m sure you can figure the rest out.
Alternatively, find something in the room that is held together with large screws and use one of the components of your arsenal to remove one of them temporarily - screw this into the cork and then twist a bit of wire around the head to aid your grip (unless the bottle opener, or something else, can be made to grip the screw).
Are these the metal coat hangers where the hook part is twisted around the main body?
Un-twist the hook portion, then rapidly bend the hanger just below the twisted part back and forth until it breaks off. Voila! You now have a do-it-yourself corkscrew. Use as normal.
Break the nail clippers in half, or just twist them so you can use the clipping edge on something thicker than a fingernail.
Whittle away on the cork on opposite sides. (Hard to describe, but think of it as the opposite of the head of a screw. Instead of a slot, you want a ridge as tall as possible.)
Unbend the coathanger. Use one end to make a hook. Press the hook through the ridge in the top of the cork.
Wrap the coathanger around the chopsticks for a better grip, and pull.
I just had to use the chopsticks in there somewhere.
Get the electric kettle, boil water and put the bottle in boiling water until the cork pops out. Leave the bottle under the tap with running cold water until the wine cools down. Meanwhile, play with the hairdryer, chopsticks, various electronic equipment and plastic fork until you get that frizzzy hairstyle only worthy of a true MacGiver.
No. I have one in my car, two in my purse, my travel bag, my desk, and half a dozen other places.
Just push the cork into the bottle with the end of a toothbrush. One thing I can pretty much guarantee you is the cork floating in the wine is not going to add any ‘corkiness’ to it.
