What do you do when you can’t unscrew the inscrutable?
You become a hacker!
You’re enjoying dinner with friends; they’ve done the cooking, your job was to bring the wine. You’ve brought a Yealands Single Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc 2015 to go with the Snapper pie. Lovely savvy, one of our favourites.
Only one tiny problem: I can’t get the screw cap off. We found that hard before with this particular wine, so we look for the oyster knife to cut deeper into the separation between cap and neck piece. No luck this time.
We try a moist, grippy cloth. Still no luck; the screwcap won’t budge. We start looking for pliers, but the ones in our friends’ kitchen aren’t big enough. This is becoming tedious. The only option left is to hack the screw cap, which of course is metal.
Eventually, we work the old corkscrew through it, and we use the oyster knife to widen the opening. The screw cap still won’t budge, but at least we can pour the wine.
The wine was lovely, and so was the Snapper pie.
I also brought a 1993 Wendouree Shiraz Mataro which was a great red in perfect condition, opened at the peak of its long career. The cork had broken in half but I got it all with the old Ah-So two pronged opener. It’s much better at getting fragile old corks out of bottles than any corkscrew but it takes practice to get the hang of it.
As a footnote, I keep meeting wine lovers who think the Stelvin cap has solved all the old problems that can befall wine. That’s not so: the only problem the cap solves is that of cork taint, which was fairly common in the wines of the nineties. All the other problems are still with us, so we still strike wines that are in poor health or off. Just thought I’d add that caution. And keep your sturdy old corkscrew handy for a bit longer.
Kim