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17 June 2006
Bottle of wine won't open!→[More:]I have a bottle of wine with one of those plasticy-rubbery corks that will NOT COME OUT!
I think you should be able to find a bartenders' corkscrew for cheap, k8t, even a reasonably well-constructed one. I was stuck and managed to find a decent one for around $6 CDN--it's worked better than the more pricey one I had at home. Doesn't help you now, though.
And if the hot water makes the neck expand, then why does it work to get screw tops off?
If you run hot water directly on to the lid it will expand first, if you get the bottle neck before the cork, it will expand first.
It's all a matter of technique.
Now this won't work on a wedged in plastic cork, but did you know you can open a normaly corked bottle by repeatedly hitting the bottom of the bottle against a tree or door jamb? Not hard enough to break the bottle, of course. After a while the cork will start to inch out.
I thought the hot water was to make the metal lids on jars expand, not the glass part?
Anyhow, my dad once resorted to using a power drill with a screwdriver attachment to open a bottle of wine. Drilled in a Big-Ass screw, and then yanked it out with plyers.
My roomate's a former waiter, he has one of those waiter's corkscrews danf mentioned. It kicks the ass of anything I've ever used, even on the plastic corks. http://www.invinoveritas.com/bestof/corkscrew.shtml
huh. We have one of those, and I didn't even know it was a waiters' corkscrew. It was a gift from a wine company (along with wine) to all the crew members (my husband was one) who did this one shoot at their vineyard. That's a pretty good endorsement of a corkscrew, I guess.
They really are the best. He had to get his own at his first fancy-pants resturant job, and was originally miffed about it. Now he's happy since it means he got to keep it when he left the job.
(although I feel funny knowing it was once used on $100 bottles of wine, and we use it for stuff that rarely costs more than $15.)
Like I said its a matter of technique. If the bottle and cork is real cold and you hold the neck upside down under fairly hot water while rotating it in the stream for just a few seconds, the neck only will expand.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
