Cutting the foil: the step most people rush
Before the corkscrew even comes out, there is a step that most people skip or botch: cutting the foil capsule cleanly. That small cap of aluminium, tin, or wax covering the neck of the bottle is there to protect the cork during storage and transport — it is not decoration, and tearing it off with your fingers leaves a ragged edge that can catch the wine as you pour.
The right technique is to cut just below the lip of the bottle — the small ridge you can feel with your thumb about a centimetre down from the top of the neck. Cutting below that ridge matters for a simple hygienic reason: as the wine flows out, it will not run across the cut edge of the foil or touch the metal. A foil knife, the small blade built into most waiters' friends (the folding corkscrew used by sommeliers and restaurant staff), or the tip of a paring knife all work well. One clean circular cut, peel away the top, and you are ready.
Wax capsules — common on artisan wines, natural wines, and bottles intended for long cellaring — look intimidating but are not. You can drive the corkscrew spiral straight through the wax without removing it first; the wax parts easily around the metal. There is no need to chip it away with a knife. If you do try to remove it entirely, you will spend more time cleaning wax off the table than drinking the wine.
Some people prefer to remove the foil capsule entirely, especially on older bottles. It is a good habit when you are opening a wine that has been cellared for ten years or more. A cork that is visibly mouldy on its surface, or soaked in wine all the way up its length, can be a sign of a faulty seal — and removing the foil gives you that information before you commit to opening the bottle.
The waiter's friend: the one tool worth putting in your pocket
If you own only one corkscrew, make it this one. The waiter's friend — called a somelière in French, or a sommelier knife — is a compact folding tool that combines a spiral worm, a small blade for cutting foil, and a hinged lever arm for extracting the cork. It fits in a jacket pocket, costs a fraction of what fancier gadgets do, and is the tool you will find in the apron pocket of every sommelier in France, every caviste (the independent wine specialist shops that sit between the supermarket and the fine-wine merchant), and every reasonably well-equipped kitchen. It takes about two minutes to learn.
The technique: centre the tip of the spiral on the middle of the cork, then turn clockwise, pressing down gently, until only one full turn of the spiral remains visible above the cork. Hook the first notch of the lever arm onto the lip of the bottle neck and pull the handle upward, raising the cork partway out. Then switch to the second notch — most modern waiter's friends have two — and finish extracting the cork with a smooth, controlled pull. That two-stage lever action is important: it lets you extract the cork in a straight, even line rather than yanking it out at an angle, which is what splits corks.
The quality of the spiral — sometimes called the worm or the helix — makes most of the difference between a good waiter's friend and a useless one. A good spiral is thin, solid (not hollow like an auger), and has open, widely spaced coils. It screws into the cork rather than tearing through it. Cheap models tend to have a thick, hollow, auger-style worm that shreds the cork from the inside, leaving you with floating fragments in your glass.
Expect to spend between €15 and €40 for a reliable model. Laguiole and Forge de Laguiole are French makers with a long reputation in the trade; Pulltex is a Spanish brand widely used in professional kitchens. A good waiter's friend is a sound investment if you open bottles regularly, particularly French red wines with older corks that deserve careful handling.
The air-pump corkscrew: fast, but not for every bottle
This one always gets a reaction the first time someone sees it: a long hollow needle pushed straight through the cork, a small hand pump, and the cork slides out on a cushion of compressed air. No twisting, no lever, no risk of snapping the spiral inside the cork. It is easy to see why it sells well.
There is one important limitation to know before you use it. On an old, dry, or already-fragile cork, the sudden injection of air can cause the cork to shatter inward rather than rise cleanly. The result is a shower of cork fragments in the bottle, and an extraction you have completely lost control of. The harder the pump, the worse the result.
There is also a physics question. Compressed air injected into the bottle slightly raises the internal pressure. On a very old wine, a delicate wine that has been cellared for decades, or a naturally sparkling wine where the pressure is already meaningful, some winemakers and oenologists advise against the method as a precaution. For an everyday drinking wine — a straightforward red under ten years old, a simple white bought last week — it works fine. For a serious old bottle, choose something else.
The air-pump corkscrew is genuinely useful for people who find the waiter's friend physically awkward — those with limited grip strength or arthritis in their hands. For wines under €15 that you are opening in the same week you bought them, it is a perfectly valid option.
The Ah-So: the tool that saves old vintages
An odd-looking thing: two flat metal prongs of unequal length, no spiral at all. It is sometimes called the butler's friend, and the name comes with a story — the tool supposedly allowed a discreet butler to withdraw the cork from his employer's port without leaving a mark, help himself to a glass, and reseat the cork as though the bottle had never been touched. Whether or not the story is true, it explains the design.
Its real value is entirely respectable. The Ah-So is the right tool for old, fragile corks. When a wine has been cellaring for fifteen or twenty years, the cork can dry out, shrink slightly, or become so compressed that a spiral corkscrew would punch straight through it and split it apart. The two prongs of the Ah-So are designed to slide down between the cork and the glass of the bottle neck, gripping the cork from the outside rather than piercing it. Once both prongs are fully inserted, you twist gently while pulling upward — a motion that feels counterintuitive the first time — and the cork comes out intact, with no damage.
The learning curve is real. The first two or three times you use one, you are more likely to push the cork into the bottle than to draw it out. That is normal. The key is to work the two prongs in alternately, starting with the longer one, pressing each a little deeper before moving to the other, and never forcing. When both prongs are properly seated around the cork, the extraction is smooth. Rushing the insertion is what pushes the cork down.
For anyone who collects older vintages, buys bottles from estate sales or family cellars, or simply has a few bottles that have been sleeping in storage for a decade or more, the Ah-So is essential kit. It is also the tool to reach for with aged prestige Champagnes — the kind of cuvées available from specialist retailers like Vinatis, where the cork may be decades old and the contents are worth treating carefully.
Electric corkscrews and wing corkscrews: who they are for and why
The electric corkscrew has a loyal following, and it earns it. You place the device over the bottle neck, press a button, and the cork is out in a few seconds. No technique to learn, no effort, no leverage required. For someone opening several bottles a week, running a small supper club, or dealing with arthritis or reduced hand strength, it is a genuine solution rather than a gimmick.
The trade-offs are real too. Electric corkscrews are bulky, need recharging, and start at around €30 for a model that actually works. Cheaper versions often struggle with long corks or very tight fits because the spiral is not long enough to grip the bottom half of the cork — and a cork extracted only halfway is more problematic than one you have not started on. Before buying, check that the spiral length matches the corks you typically encounter: standard corks run 38 to 54 mm; longer corks are common on wines designed for extended cellaring.
The wing corkscrew — the one with two hinged arms that rise on either side as you press the spiral down — is familiar in a great many French and European kitchens. It has been around for generations, it is simple, and it is sturdy. Its persistent weakness is the same one found in most budget corkscrews: a thick, hollow auger-style worm that tears cork rather than threading through it cleanly.
If you already own one that works for you, there is no reason to replace it. But if you are buying your first serious corkscrew, a quality waiter's friend remains the most versatile choice by a wide margin. It opens a tannic Bordeaux red that has been cellaring for years just as easily as a crisp white you are serving chilled before dinner — and for exploring the best French white wines, it is the right companion.
Opening Champagne: nothing like a regular corkscrew
Champagne is a different bottle in every sense. There is no cork to extract with a corkscrew — or rather, there is a cork, but it is held in place by a wire cage called a muselet, which is twisted tight to contain the carbon dioxide pressure inside the bottle. That pressure, typically around six atmospheres — roughly three times the pressure in a car tyre — is what keeps the wine sparkling, and it is what makes the opening technique completely different from still wine.
The correct method: hold the bottle at a 45-degree angle, pointing away from people and windows. Remove the foil from the top, then unwind the muselet wire — by convention, always six half-turns — while keeping your thumb firmly over the top of the cork. Do not remove the muselet entirely; leave it loosely around the cork to give you more to grip. Then place one hand around the cork and cage, keep it firm and still, and rotate the bottle slowly with your other hand. The cork will rise gradually under the internal pressure and exit with a quiet sigh rather than a bang. That sigh — rather than a loud pop — tells you that the carbon dioxide and the bubbles have been preserved rather than lost in a surge of foam.
Sabrage — opening Champagne with the back of a heavy knife or a proper sabre by running the blade along the seam of the glass and striking the rim of the neck — is a real technique and not especially difficult once you know it. The glass breaks cleanly along the seam under the combination of pressure and impact, and the collar of the bottle detaches in one piece. It is dramatic, and it works. Reserve it for outdoor occasions with space around you; small fragments of glass can travel further than you expect.
A bottle of Champagne should never point toward a guest, a window, or anything fragile. A cork can leave the bottle at over 50 km/h (31 mph). Once opened and poured, tilt the glass slightly as you fill it to run the wine down the side — this preserves the bubbles better than pouring straight down into an upright glass. For choosing which Champagne to open in the first place, see our guide to the best Champagnes for the price.
The cork breaks or falls in: what to do
It happens to everyone, regardless of experience. An old, dry cork, a spiral that went in slightly off-centre, one impatient pull — and suddenly there is a piece of cork floating in your Côtes du Rhône. (Côtes du Rhône is a broad appellation covering a large area of the southern Rhône Valley in France, producing mainly medium-bodied reds from Grenache and Syrah — the kind of everyday bottle that gets opened without ceremony.) A fragment of cork in the wine is neither a catastrophe for the wine's quality nor a reason to abandon the evening.
The simplest fix is to pour the wine through a fine-mesh strainer or a clean piece of muslin set over a decanter or a jug. The cork is caught, the wine passes through cleanly, and the decanting has the side benefit of aerating a young, closed-in red wine — opening up its aromas a little, as though it had been in the glass for twenty minutes already. An irritating accident turned into reasonable cellar practice.
When the cork falls entirely into the bottle — which happens when a crumbling cork finally gives way all at once — it looks worse than it is. A natural cork submerged in wine for a few minutes does not add any off-flavour; the contact time is simply too short. Pour carefully, using a knife or a long spoon held across the bottle neck to hold the cork back, or decant everything through a strainer in one go.
The more useful question when a cork crumbles badly is whether the problem was technique or storage. A cork that falls apart on a fifteen-year-old bottle may mean the bottle was stored upright for years — which dries the cork out, as it needs to stay in contact with the wine to remain supple — or was kept somewhere too warm or with fluctuating temperatures. It does not necessarily make the wine undrinkable, but it is worth noting if you have other bottles from the same case.
For corks that resist the spiral entirely — swollen, unusually dense, or seized tight in the neck — try sliding a thin, flexible knife blade between the cork and the glass to break the seal slightly before resuming with the corkscrew. The Ah-So is also an excellent fallback in this situation: its prongs grip the outside of the cork rather than trying to thread through it, which can work where a spiral has failed.
The Coravin: opening a bottle without really opening it
The Coravin deserves its own category. Rather than extracting the cork, it uses a thin hollow needle that pierces straight through it. Wine is drawn out through the needle, and the space it leaves inside the bottle is immediately replaced by argon gas — an inert gas that does not react with wine the way oxygen does and therefore causes no oxidation. When the needle is withdrawn, the cork's natural elasticity closes around the puncture. The bottle is effectively sealed again, and can be stored for weeks or even months with no more deterioration than if it had never been touched.
This is the tool of serious collectors and wine-by-the-glass professionals — restaurants and wine bars that want to serve a single glass of an expensive or rare wine without committing to opening the whole bottle that evening. In a private cellar, it changes the logic of how you drink: instead of thinking "one bottle, one occasion," you can pour a glass of a precious wine on a Tuesday and return to the same bottle three weeks later.
The main obstacle is cost. Entry-level Coravin models start at around €200, and that is before the argon capsules, which are consumable and need replacing after roughly fifteen uses each. For someone with a serious cellar and a habit of opening bottles they cannot always finish, that cost makes sense. For everyday wines at everyday prices, it would be absurd — the Coravin costs more than most of the bottles it would be used on.
It is also worth knowing what the Coravin cannot do. It works only with natural cork stoppers — not screw caps, not synthetic corks, and absolutely not sparkling wines, where the internal pressure would push the wine back through the needle the moment it was inserted. Keep the Coravin for your finest bottles, and the waiter's friend for everything else.
Screw caps and alternative closures: no corkscrew needed
A growing number of bottles arrive with a screw cap, and this is worth welcoming rather than apologising for. The screw cap eliminates the single most common wine fault: cork taint, a musty, damp-cardboard smell and taste caused by a chlorine compound called TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole) that forms when certain moulds in natural cork interact with chlorine-based compounds used in winery sanitation. Estimates vary, but studies have suggested that somewhere between 3% and 5% of bottles sealed with natural cork carry some level of TCA contamination — which means that across a case of twelve bottles, you might statistically expect one affected wine. The screw cap removes that risk entirely.
Screw caps are standard in New Zealand and Australia, very common in Germany and Austria, and increasingly used in France — particularly for crisp, aromatic whites meant to be drunk young, such as Muscadet (a dry, mineral white from the Loire Valley, made from the Melon de Bourgogne grape and typically served with seafood), Picpoul de Pinet (a sharp, citrusy white from the Languedoc on France's Mediterranean coast), and many Alsatian whites. The idea that screw caps signal a cheap or low-quality wine is a prejudice with no real basis. Several highly regarded producers have used them for decades on wines that age perfectly well.
The glass stopper — marketed under names like Vino-Lok or Vinolok — is a third option, rarer and more expensive, found mainly on premium German and Alsatian wines. It pulls out by hand, needs no tool, can be reused as a re-stopper, and transmits nothing to the wine. It looks elegant and solves the TCA problem as thoroughly as a screw cap does.
Synthetic corks, made from moulded plastic or compressed plant material, are pulled with a standard corkscrew but can resist more than natural cork, particularly after a few years in the bottle as the material compresses further against the glass. A solid waiter's friend with a good spiral handles them without difficulty, as long as the spiral is centred carefully — a synthetic cork that comes out at an angle can bind against the glass neck and require considerable force to free.
Common questions
Can you open a bottle of wine without a corkscrew?
Yes, and several emergency methods work when you have no corkscrew to hand. The most controlled option is to push the cork gently into the bottle using a blunt, smooth object — the handle of a wooden spoon, a thick marker pen, or a similar round-ended rod. The cork will fall into the wine, which is harmless for a short period; pour through a strainer if fragments break off. A second method involves placing the base of the bottle inside a shoe for padding, then tapping the shoe firmly against a solid wall in a rhythmic, flat motion — the hydraulic pressure of the wine can gradually work the cork out. It takes patience and a soft wall surface. A third option is to work a long, thin, sharp knife into the side of the cork and lever it out by twisting. None of these is ideal, and all carry some risk of spilling or breakage, but they work if you are careful and unhurried.
How do you stop the cork from breaking when you open the bottle?
Start by centring the spiral tip exactly on the middle of the cork — an off-centre entry is the most common cause of a split cork. Turn the spiral in slowly and steadily without pressing too hard downward, and stop when only one full coil remains visible above the cork surface. Use a spiral that is thin, solid, and open-coiled rather than thick and hollow. On an old or obviously dry cork, switch to an Ah-So before you start with a spiral corkscrew at all: the Ah-So's prongs grip the outside of the cork rather than piercing it, which greatly reduces the risk of splitting. Once you begin extracting, pull in a straight, even vertical line — no twisting, no sideways force, no sudden jerking upward.
Does wine always need to be decanted after opening?
No. Decanting is useful in two specific situations: when an older red wine has thrown a sediment — the dark, grainy deposit that forms naturally in aged wines as pigments and tannins bond together — and when a young, tannic red wine is so closed and tight on first opening that it benefits from exposure to air. In the first case, you decant slowly to leave the sediment behind in the bottle. In the second, you decant to accelerate the aeration that would otherwise happen slowly in the glass over an hour or more. A straightforward young red, most white wines, and virtually all rosés can simply be poured directly into the glass, where they will open up on their own within a few minutes.
How do you open a bottle of Champagne without it foaming everywhere?
Temperature is the first factor: the wine must be well chilled, between 6°C and 8°C (43°F and 46°F). A warm bottle holds its CO2 less well, and any disturbance will release it suddenly. Hold the bottle at 45 degrees, remove the foil, and unwind the wire muselet — six half-turns by convention — while keeping your thumb pressed firmly over the cork. Do not remove the muselet cage entirely; leave it loose around the base of the cork for grip. Then keep one hand steady around the cork and cage, and rotate the bottle slowly with your other hand, letting the internal pressure do the work. The cork should ease out gradually with a quiet hiss, not a loud pop. If the cork resists, try pressing down slightly on it while turning — that can break the initial seal without releasing the pressure all at once.
Which corkscrew should you buy if you only want one?
A waiter's friend — also called a sommelier knife or somelière — with a thin, solid, open-coiled spiral and a two-stage lever arm. It covers the vast majority of situations you will ever encounter, fits in a pocket or a drawer, lasts for years with no maintenance, and works anywhere. Budget between €20 and €40 for a model with a good-quality spiral; that is the part that matters most. If you regularly open old bottles — wines that have been cellaring for ten years or more — add an Ah-So to your kit. Between those two tools, you will be prepared for almost anything a wine cellar can offer.