How to Open a Wine Bottle as a Waiter

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Leslie Moselle and we're here at Mickey Quinn's in Seminole, Florida and on behalf of Expert Village, this is how to be a successful server. I have my bottle of wine. I've presented it to my customer. Now it's time to pour the wine. This is a white wine. It's Riesling. Make sure that you keep this chilled throughout the meal either with some ice or with some type of cooler. If it's red wine, then you can just nicely place the bottle of wine on the table for the customer. I'm going to go ahead and show you the proper way to open it. With your wine key, you do have a rigged edge knife. It's really small, but it's really easy. Basically, you just take it and you rub it across the rim all the way across the wine bottle. Then the foil will lift right off. Be careful. Sometimes the foil is a little sharper on some wine bottles. It can be even sharper than the knife and you can cut yourself. You really don't want to cut yourself in front of the customer. You put your knife away. Then there is the screw portion of it and there's a tip on there that you want to try to place in the center of the cork. The more centered you get, the easier the cork is actually going to come out of the wine bottle. You want to twist the screw all the way down until you can no longer see anymore of it. Then you can see this part here. You want to hook this part onto the lip of the bottle. You can see here, I've actually twisted too far in. Some are a little higher than others. You press down on the lip, you lift it, and the cork comes right out. You want to be careful with these things to make sure not to get your tip too far down into the cork because that can break your cork. You don't bits and pieces of cork in your wine bottle to serve with your customers. You want to make sure they have a nice clean glass of wine. Now, I'm going to go ahead and pour the wine for the table."