Open a Wine Bottle Correctly

Video Transcript

"How to correctly open a bottle of wine. By now you would have prepared your wine. If it is vintage wine, you either settled it for four, five hours. If it's a white wine, it would have been in the fridge for a couple of hours to get it to drinking temperature. Wines now come in different enclosures. Screw cap which is straightforward, and then you have normally, the traditional one has been a cork, which is a natural product, which is soft and spongy. And modern ones are - can often be this plastic material or rubbery material. Now, this style of enclosure is not very gentle to certain styles of corkscrews, but we'll come to that later. But initially when you get your bottle, in this case I'm using a foil cutter, and the purpose of that is to remove the covering of the wine, the cap as it's called. It's got four little cutters in there, which come, you sit this on top of the bottle and you press it together and you simply rotate it and the foil cutter cuts the foil. And there you go. A very neat, very nice, for at the dinner table, no mess involved. So with an artificial enclosure, I would prefer to use a waiter's friend as a small robust, a waiter's friend has got the actual screw parts, the lever, and it has actually a foil cutter. Before I use - this is a foil cutter but you can use this one - obviously this is more delicate as it's a naked blade. You would just put it against the foil rotate the bottle with it, and that way the foil would come off in a very similar fashion. Fold that away, and I'm ready to begin to open the bottle. So I place this screw in the center of the enclosure, and then resting it against the table, just screw the cork in, corkscrew in. And once it's taken a grip it becomes easier. And what you want to do is to get it to a stage where the lever is in this position on the bottle, that gives you enough movements to actually open the bottle. So I perhaps I rest on there, I carry on turning it, as you can see this is now immediately right angle to start levering out. There it is. So the first - once it's in place, pushing the lever part against the bottle I can pull out my cork. You have to struggle with some of these artificial enclosures. This one came out quite quickly, that's because it's a very smooth anyway. With a natural cork, they're much softer and so they're easier to open than the artificial enclosure. Again with a natural cork, I place my waiter's friend in the center and I rotate it, letting it go into the cork. You find less resistance with this, and I do exactly the same, I rotate it until I've got a leverage or enough movement on the lever so that I can open it. Now it's ready. Place my hand here to keep the stand in place, and then I lever it out. Let's try that, then it comes out gently, nice. And these make a nice pop, and that's a natural cork, still in order, unscrew it. And you can see the cork is preserved ready for use again. A lever opener like this one, this really advanced one, is the very convenient, very easy to use. You open it artfully, in this fashion, clamp the bottle and then you simply lever it on and slowly off, and that will open the cork. And you can actually take the cork off very similarly, and that's a very simple operation. So the way you're opening lots of bottles or you want to impress your friends, one of these is great. They do cost however around forty or fifty pounds, with something that you can afford to lose and they're very robust, and they can be used on the picnic or the dinner table, these ones, the wing meters, are okay, but they're very good for artificial enclosures like that, which are very sometimes very hard to remove, however with a cork, because they're not hollow like the waiter's friend which is hollow, they're filled in the center of the spiral, they have a tendency to break up the cork so the best thing is not to use these on an old bottle or very delicate cork. So that's how you open wine bottles."