Dealing with a broken cork screw and a stuck wine cork

[cheeni]

This bottle of wine seemed set on denying its pleasures to us from the very start. Remarkably it survived a motorbike ride in a backpack, ineffectual late-night attempts at opening the bottle with a nail scissor in a hotel room and a plane ride in checked-in baggage.

Today seemed like the night it had been waiting for. We had a hot meal of steamed corn and roast vegetables, and "Snakes on the plane" was playing on the tele. Sturdy looking cork screw in hand I managed to coax the bottle into accepting the screw all the way to its final curves. The slippery cork that threatened to slip down into the bottle held. Nice, now for some wine - NOT. The cork screw snapped at the first pull leaving an orphaned screw in the bottleneck.

These situations seem to happen to me once in a while as if to mock my 20 years of formal education. Never fear, a few Google searches followed by a few interesting videos [on sabering champagne (I'm leaving out the links to 10 other videos on the same subject), making a plum cake, breakfast tacos, ginger bread, Puerco Pibil, christmas turkey and cookie dough] later, I realized the wine bottle was still waiting. Some gentle teasing with a nylon noose around the 0.5 inches of screw jutting out managed to get me a hold on the screw with a plier. Pulling vertically didn't help, so one of us held the bottle and the other pulled at the screw and what do you know it worked.

A great evening's work I'd say...

Comments

[a5hok.livejournal.com]

i have seen some people use an empty retracted injection syringe to puncture the cork, push the plunger, and then the pull the syringe back again which seems to remove the cork very easily.
But, never tried that myself :)

[sriniram.livejournal.com]

Hmm... yeah, I can see how that would work. Elegant and neat. I don't have any syringes at home, I used to have plenty of them as a kid though - for ahem... alternative uses.

I used to inject liquids made from my chemistry set into the cactus plant outside my window. The plant never did turn any other color than green and wasted though. Never blue or pink, which were the results I was shooting for. Syringes also used to make an awesome flamethrower if you spray kerosene through a lit match.