In all my years of wine bottle opening I had never seen this happen. The screw was in the cork, the cork was starting to dislodge when, snap! The corkscrew broke in two, leaving a good chunk of screw firmly wedged in the cork. Now what? I really, really wanted to drink that wine, which I had purchased only hours earlier at my neighborhood fromagerie in the hopes of pairing it with the evening's dinner. But without a back-up corkscrew, and with all the stores in Brussels already closed for the night, there was nothing I could do but grab a beer out of the fridge and wait for tomorrow.Tomorrow arrived, I purchased a new corkscrew, and set about salvaging the bottle. With some help from a marvelously capable butter knife, and a lot of patience - I worked on this thing for a good 15 minutes, photography time not included - the screw finally came loose. Wielding the new, and hopefully less breakable, corkscrew I removed what was left of the cork and finally got to sit back and enjoy a glass of chilled white wine. Because I had used the Worst Corkscrew Ever It took me two days to do what normally would take mere seconds. Lesson learned: one corkscrew in the house is never enough. Always have a back-up.
4 comments:
You could always just push the cock into the bottle using the blunt end of a butter knife, as long as the cock isn't torn to pieces.
Wow. I've never seen that happen either. I've had knives snap off their handles before, though.
I have to agree with Greg above, just push the cock into the bottle... really hard.
You know, that idea to push the cork into the bottle never even occured to me. I should have posted a "what do I do now?" entry before getting all MacGyver with the butter knife!
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