More than once, I’ve arrived at a remote spot without a corkscrew, on a boat one time and a trail another. The groans from my fellow travelers were unbearable as we stared longingly at a bottle meant to mark the moment. I once rescued the day by chipping a cork apart with a screwdriver. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Over the years I’ve heard of many ingenious ways to open a bottle of wine. Take Napoleon’s Hussars. Their leader happily accepted gifts of champagne but had no time to stop and pop corks. So, as the story goes, the cavalrymen never dismounted. They simply drew their sabers and slid the blades along the seam of the bottle, its weak point. When the blade struck the lip, the glass collar snapped cleanly off. The practice became a tradition, which raises the question of how many soldiers were wounded away from the battlefield. Sabering has since made guest appearances with celebrity chefs like Alton Brown and in high-end restaurants where spectacle is a calling card. Mirko Rainer, a Swiss-Italian sommelier, even set a Guinness World Record for sabering dozens of bottles at speed.
I’ve tried this at home several times with mixed success, using a heavy cleaver from my late uncle’s meat market and a World War II bayonet I picked up at a flea market years ago. I still have the bayonet, waiting for the moment someone begs for a demonstration.
A more delicate method was on display recently at a ceremony at the Marqués de Riscal hotel in Rioja, where a winemaker opened a bottle of 1945 Marqués de Riscal with hot tongs. The technique is traditionally used on old bottles whose corks are too fragile to remove any other way. Port tongs are heated until red hot, then clamped around the neck just below the cork. In less than a minute, cold water is applied, and the glass cracks cleanly along the line the tongs traced. No shards. I haven’t tried this one. My talents are limited to screwdrivers and bayonets.
Then there’s the shoe method.
Set the bottom of the bottle in the heel of a shoe, wrap it in a towel, and beat the daylights out of it against a tree or wall. The wine slams forward into the neck and slowly pushes the cork out far enough to grab with your fingers. You can also hold the bottle upside down, firmly between your knees, and bang it with a shoe or boot. This calls for someone sober and well coordinated, because an errant swing could derail family plans.
Another method seems inspired by MacGyver, the hero of the old television show who made do with improvised gadgets. If you’re near a garage, drive a screw into the center of the cork and pull it straight out with pliers or the claw of a hammer. On a bicycle trip, you can insert the needle of an air pump into the cork and pump until the cork pops out.
And then there’s the safest method of all: push the cork into the bottle and live with a few floating bits of cork in your glass.
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