Imagine: you’ve got your favourite bottle of Italian wine, getting ready to curl up on the sofa with a generous portion of tiramisu. You’ve worked hard all day and god knows you deserve the treat.
You’ve opened more wine bottles in your lifetime than you’ve opened doors – you’re a pro – you can open a wine bottle in your sleep. This particular wine cork doesn’t care how much experience you have, it’s not budging. Try as much as you can, it’s determined to have its own way.
Eventually, being the pro that you are, you manage to tease the cork out a slow and careful inch at a time. It looks like everything’s going to be just fine and you can settle down to the relaxed evening that you planned.
Half way through coaxing the cork out, and without warning, the cork breaks. You promised yourself you wouldn’t swear on weekdays, and so you don’t.
What do you do now? Give up and throw it in the bin? Scream into a pillow? Take it out on the tiramisu?
No. This is what you do:
- Carefully and completely untwist the corkscrew from the cork, then try twisting the screw back in again to a level where you feel you’ve gotten a good grip. Pull the cork out slowly and gently. Try this a couple of times.
- If the above doesn’t work, then try pushing the whole cork downwards through the bottle. You might not be able to get it out, but you may be able to push it down until the cork is in the wine.
- If that works, then it’s more than likely you’ll have bits of the cork floating about in the wine. To filter those bits out, try pouring the wine through a coffee filter or cheesecloth.
Enjoy!
(img by: Vox Efx)