HOW TO END THE NIGHTMARE OF NOT HAVING A CORKSCREW AT A PARTY

Now everyone has been in this situation I’m sure: you’re at a party with a bottle of wine and some idiot has stolen the corkscrew and the only alcoholic beverages you have left are bottles of wine using a cork stopper. This situation occurs quite often in my life, and being a borderline alcoholic I find it quite alarming. So you have two choices: go round the party wasting valuable drinking time looking for a corkscrew, or attempt one of the ‘tried and tested’ methods. You may have tried some of these with mixed success.

The ‘wooden spoon’ method

Try and push the cork into the bottle whilst trying to avoid splinters. This method can work, but more often than not it descends into a strongman competition with crowds of pissed people trying to wrestle with a bottle of wine. If it does work the only issue you now have is the 50 drunken people vying for the only bottle of open wine at the party. Slim pickings = bad times.

The ‘smash the s**t out of the top’ method

This always seems like the best idea when you are pissed: you get a hammer, (or god forbid a sword) and you try smashing the top off the bottle. Come on you’ve all tried this one! So you think you can just hold it over the sink and give it a good whack; but then the whole bottle shatters. This leads to you impaling your hand on glass and not knowing whether it is red wine, blood, or a mixture of the two you are drinking. Oh and on a side note, alcohol in wounds is not pleasant, trust me! This method can work though. Before I explain it I better, I perhaps should inform you that this is definitely a ‘don’t try this at home’ method.

However if you do choose to try it (and let’s face it you probably are if you decided to read on and are confronted with this problem in the near future)…all you need to do is take the foil off the bottle so you can see the bottom of the cork and then get a fat knife, axe or sword (something that is sturdy with a sharp point). Make sure you are pointing the bottle down so the glass runs-off with the initial flow of liquid, then give it a hard whack just below the cork and the top should come off cleanly leaving you with an open bottle. Please check that there are no bits of glass in your wine before you imbibe it, and don’t drink straight from the bottle unless you think that the blood-lip look is in this season – I think a new series of True Blood starts next week so it definitely could be I guess.

Phil’s recommended method: ‘The shoe trick’

If you haven’t heard of this method of opening a bottle of wine then you haven’t lived in as much alcohol desperation as I have. This situation occurs with me regularly – you forget the corkscrew and you don’t have a wooden spoon or sword with you. What do you do? Well most people wear shoes, so here is the tried and trusted shoe method. First remove the foil around the top of the bottle of wine, insert the bottle in a shoe (base first) making sure the base of the bottle is parallel to the sole of the shoe. Then hit the sole of the shoe against a wall, or anything solid and vertical. You should only have to hit it about 5-10 times until the cork comes out enough to pull out. Please make sure you don’t hit the bottle too hard against the wall, as I said before broken glass, impaling and blood equates to bad wine times.