I should have just bought a sixpack of beer
I’ve been out of town on business for the last couple of days, and tonight I got sick of room service. So I ordered takeout from a sushi restaurant down the street, and on my way back to the hotel picked up a half bottle of wine to go with my dinner. Only to realize once I got back to the room that I didn’t have a corkscrew.Motherfucker.
After about fifteen minutes of struggle, involving keys, pens, chopsticks, and just about every other implement you can possibly imagine, I had the bright idea of doing an internet search on how to open a wine bottle without a corkscrew.
The first idea I came across was this:
Get a hammer and a butter knife. Put the butter knife in the cork, hammer it in and push the cork through.Hammers and butter knives being in somewhat short supply in room 234 of the Omni Shoreham, I tried using a shoe and chopstick. OK, not so much with the success on that one. So I looked further and came up with this:
Turn the bottle upside down and lightly hit the bottom of the bottle against a tree. After a few hundred taps, the momentum from the wine inside the bottle will slowly push the cork out.Guessing that my neighbors would not appreciate the sound of a wine bottle being lightly hit a few hundred times against our shared wall, I looked further and finally came up with my personal favorite--using a saber:
The bottle is held in the left hand and the saber wielded with the right hand: the saber slides along the neck of the bottle and hits with its flat the place where the bottle seam joins the thicker (and last) part of the neck. If done properly, the high pressure inside the bottle will crack cleanly the glass, and the top of bottle (cork and all) will fly away.
So anyway, I ended up calling room service and having them bring me a corkscrew.
posted by Amarula Dreams @ 11:01 PM
