How To Use A Waiter's Style Corkscrew - Wine Enthusiast

Hi, I’m Marshall Tilden with The Wine Enthusiast, and today we’re gonna learn how to use a waiter’s style corkscrew. These corkscrews are really the most traditional way to open a bottle of wine. They come in various [styles], makes and quality levels, but they all have basically the same parts in order to open the bottle: They’re all gonna have the hinge at the top; they’ll have

the worm—or the spiral—which will drill into the cork; and the blade, which is going to help remove [the foil] off the top of the bottle. So, let’s see how they work!

First step is going to be to take the top of the foil off. There’s a couple of notches on the bottles where the cork goes in, and some different schools of thought [on where to cut the foil]. You’re going to put your pointer finger behind the blade here for a little bit of guidance. I go under the first notch here, and you really should [also]. The reason is: If you go off the top notch—if there’s some foil that frays, which can happen when you cut it off and you’re pouring the wine out—and it touches the foil, it can kind of taint the wine. So you just take the foil cutter and put it up to that top notch. Go around a few times, once or twice, and the foil comes right off.

Put the blade away, making sure not to hurt yourself, and pull out the spiral part of the corkscrew. You know, hold the bottle firmly. Use your middle finger here to kinda guide the worm into the bottle and get it lined up so it goes right into the middle. Once it’s in there, start drilling down.

You’ll just simply turn the corkscrew down… You don’t want to go all the way down, maybe about three-quarters of the way, and once you’ve done so—see the hinge, a lot of times, will have a couple of notches. You might not be able to get to the first notch—or you may, and that helps you out a little bit—and then you can hit the second notch on the bottom here.

Put it on the lip of the bottle and then you’re simply gonna pull up with the corkscrew. Nice and slowly, you don’t want to go too hard. If you do, you get that big popping sound, you can spill the wine all over. Comes right out of the bottle, nice and simple. Once you’re done, just twist the cork right off the worm.

You’ll find that most servers and restaurants and hospitality setups will use these. They travel easy, they’re simple to use, and, as you can see, it’s just kind of a cool way to open a bottle. This is the Elite Corkscrew. Like I said, they come in all different styles. This has a very nice wood trim on the front. There’s our Wine Enthusiast professional Waiter’s Corkscrew, which is sort of an entry-level, so you’re gonna find various styles of these on wineenthusiast.com, and if you have any questions just give us a call at 800-356-8466. Cheers.