Featured Image Credit: TikTok/@ty.ree.suh
Topics: Food and Drink, News, TikTok, Hacks
Kit Roberts
A woman has shown how you can extract the cork from a bottle of wine without using a corkscrew.
Picture it, you've decided to be fancy for a change and buy a bottle of wine that's posh enough to use a cork. No screw tops for you tonight, no ma'am, tonight we are being classy. We could even swirl it round in a glass a bit first. Everything is ready, there are snacks, there's music.
Then comes the moment of realisation that you have made a terrible mistake. You overplayed your hand by getting wine with a cork, and now the gods are punishing you for your hubris.
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There's no corkscrew.
There are some options here. You could go out and purchase a corkscrew, but it might be late and the shops are shut.
There's also the technique where you put the bottle in a shoe and then smack it against a wall, which will eventually cause the cork to poke out enough that you can grab it - or at least in theory. I wish I could get back the fruitless hours I've spent whacking a bottle of wine in a shoe against a brick wall.
However, sit down, take a deep breath, and put your shoes back on, because a woman on TikTok has shared a method of extracting a cork which actually looks like it might work this time.
User @ty.ree.suh showed off the method, which involves using a knife and fork to get the cork out. You will need a sharp pointed knife, a standard dinner knife won't do, with a blade that's narrow enough to fit into a wine bottle - any fork is fine.
The first step is to stab the knife far down into the cork until it's a good way in. Then, hook the fork around the flat of the knife, so you have a lever of sorts.
Then, very carefully, use the fork to rotate the cork and pull it up as you go. This should be sufficient to pull the cork out of the bottle. Et voila!
Sometimes, however, even with a corkscrew alternative, techniques are required to open wine. When opening a particularly old bottle of wine, we're talking decades old here, the cork has often deteriorated too much for a corkscrew to work.
Instead, people have to use a rather ingenious method to get past the spoiled cork. They heat the neck of the bottle with a blowtorch to a very high temperature.
This weakens the glass around the neck of the bottle enough for it to be snapped off, bypassing the cork entirely. The wine is then strained through a sieve to catch any glass and bits in it before being served.
If I were you though, I wouldn't risk it. Play it safe and use a screw top, or just drink tequila instead.