Well that was embarrassing (wine)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

What with pretty much all of my family out of town for Christmas, I was looking forward to spending Christmas alone with a bottle of good scotch. Glenlivet, to be specific. Alas, I didn’t plan far enough ahead. I got off work tonight (Christmas Eve) only to discover that Safeway was giving a big “fuck you” to those of us who don’t work 9 to 5 by closing before 8PM. I didn’t feel like driving all over town to find a store that was both open and in the business of selling hard liquor, so I continued on to the nearest convenience store. There, I settled for a half-rack of 16-ounce MGD, and decided to peruse their astonishingly large selection of local wines.

I settled on a $30 bottle of a nice (I guessed) 2009 cabernet sauvignon (NxNW from the Walla Walla Valley, here in Washington).

And that’s where all the trouble started. I got the wine home, and proceeded to open the bottle …

Or rather, tried to open the bottle. This was when I realized mymistake. I’m not normally a wine drinker. The only time I drink wine is when I visit my sister, who loves wine. I usually drink beer, and when I’m in the mood I drink some good single-malt scotch. The last bottle of wine I bought was a bottle of MD 20/20. 20+ years ago.

In other words, I don’t own a corkscrew.

Well fuck. How was I going to get this cork out of this bottle? I peeled off the foil around the neck of the bottle, and I could see that I was dealing with a rather long cork. If it had a flange at one end, I could probably add it to my collection of butt plugs.

But dammit, I wanted to try this wine. So I wracked my brain and tried to figure out how to use the tools at my disposal. Given that I’d already had three beers, getting into my car to go searching for an open store that would sell me a corkscrew was out of the question. I learned that lesson with a DUI 21 years ago. If I’m drinking, the car stays parked.

So, between the pocketknife my mom gave me for Christmas a couple years ago, and the Leatherman that my dad gave me for Christmas a couple years ago, I went to work on that damned cork. I mostly used the can opener blade on the Leatherman. Jam it in there, give it a twist, and try to yard that cork out. All this accomplished was tearing the cork to shreds. But I was undeterred. I kept jamming that can opener into the cork, shredding away at it, until I’d destroyed the cork to the point that the can opener blade couldn’t reach any further into the neck of that bottle.

There was only one thing left to do. Use the longest blade on the pocketknife to push what was left of the cork down into the bottle. And so I did this. At which point the wine spewed out, splattering itself all over my mousepad, my keyboard, and my printer (yeah, I was performing this operation in front of my computer) and even on my monitor. Dear Og, this is where I experienced gratitude for the fact that I don’t have “a significant other”. Because if I had an SO I would have probably been trying to open this bottle for her. And gotten it all over her.

Nevertheless, the bottle was now “open”, for all intents and purposes. Of course, the cork, and all its particles, were now floating inside the bottle. So I poured the wine, filtered through a paper towel, into … a rocks glass (see: not a wine drinker; I don’t own a wine glass).

Hey, this stuff’s not bad.

2

No tool method for opening a wine bottle:
Holding the bottle horizontally with base in a shoe, bang against a wall until the cork pops out enough that you can grab and yank.

Tool method:
Twist a screw into cork. Use pliers, vise grip or something else to hold screw and yank.

3

Like, the shoes I wear on my feet?

4

Yep.

5

I need to buy a corkscrew.

6

I like this Russian guy’s demonstration:

7

You’re a boy, right? Do you have a dealy to pump air into sports balls, like basketballs? Shove that through the cork and pump air into the bottle. Increased air pressure pushes the cork out.

8

Come on…be a man and just bite the end off the bottle! :smiley:

9

Well, at 47 years old and 215 pounds, I’m well past being an athlete (though I was a long-distance runner when I was a teenager). No ball-pumping going on here.

No, I’m not a “macho man”.

Though I do have a can of Fix-a-Flat.

10

Please do not introduce fix-o-flat into the wine!

11

Last time I tried to open a bottle of wine, when already drunk, without a corkscrew, I ended up with glass in my hand and blood in the wine, due to thinking a metal fence was an ideal opener… You got off lucky!

It’s probably for the best I no longer drink.

12

You can also use the end of a wooden spoon to push the cork into the bottle without breaking it. You must use slow, even pressure.

13

You don’t need to filter it. You can pick the chunks of cork out with a spoon or something if they get in your glass, or just ignore them. They won’t hurt you.

14

Sabrage. I don’t know if it works for still wines.

15

Just bust off the neck and strain the broken glass through your teeth.

16

  1. (is always) Take the bottle to the kitchen.

  2. Take the smallest blade in the pocket knife and wedge it down between the edge of the cork and the glass.

  3. On the opposite side of the top of the cork, slip the smallest blade of the Leatherman in between the glass and the cork as far down as it will go.

  4. With the palm of your hand, squeeze the two knife handles close together and then twist like you are tightening a screw with a screw driver.

  5. with one hand pulling the glass bottle down & away from you, pull upwards on the other hand while still twisting the handles of the knives back and forth.

  6. Once the cork is out, put the bottle down safely on a flat surface and then carefully close the knife blades, one knife at a time.

  7. Pour into a wine glass until its 1/4 full and then make the wine wait 15 minutes so it can appreciate you. :wink:

17

You were sitting at your computer and it didn’t occur to you to look online for a solution BEFORE you started trying to open it? Priceless. :smiley:

18

If you do this, and then want to remove the cork from the otherwise empty bottle, you can use the trick shown in this Youtube video. And then a car mechanic from Argentina saw that video and dreamed up a way to help ease the birth of a baby. The WHO was really enthusiastic about his invention.

So who knows what can come from trouble with a wine bottle?

19

Works every time.

I came here to post this exact thing.

20

Instructional video.