Wine For Dummies

Excerpt from Wine For Dummies
Chapter 8
How to Open a Bottle and What to Do Next
Have you ever broken a cork while trying to extract it from the bottle, or taken an unusually long time to remove a stubborn cork, while your guests smiled at you uneasily? This has certainly happened to us from time to time and probably to just about everyone else who has ever pulled a cork out of a bottle of wine.

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In wine shops, we've noticed some people opting for either screw-top bottles of wine or for bag-in-a-box wines (large boxes that hold the equivalent of four or five bottles of wine in a collapsible plastic sack; you pour the wine through a nozzle near the bottom of the box). Wines packaged like this are inexpensive, and that's one good reason to buy them. But we strongly suspect that many people buy screw-top bottles or bag-in-a-box wines not just for value, but because, lurking in their minds, there is an actual fear of opening a bottle of wine that has a cork in it.

Maybe an unsuccessful encounter with an unyielding cork during their formative wine-drinking years has traumatized the screw-top and bag-in-a-box drinkers, causing them to develop corkophobia. If so, they have our sympathy. Besides the emotional trauma they've experienced, corkophobics have deprived themselves of most of the world's best wines  because just about all of those wines come with a cork in the bottle. The solution? Be armed with the right tools.

The First Step: Uncovering the Cork

The bigger the winery, the more time and money it spends creating attractive bottles that grab your eye as you walk down the aisle of the wine shop or supermarket. Part of the fetching package is the capsule, a colorful covering over the cork end of the bottle. The good news is that it's pretty; the bad news is that some coverings are difficult to remove.

These days, most wineries use colored foil or plastic capsules rather than the traditional lead capsules because of the potential risk of lead poisoning. In keeping with the sheerness trend in fashion, some wineries use a transparent cellophane covering that lets the cork show through; usually, the sheer look is found on special flange-top bottles, a fancy wine bottle with a protruding, flat lip at the top.

Whatever the material, we usually remove the entire capsule, for sanitary reasons, so that no wine can possibly come into contact with the covering. (That's one moment when we actually appreciate the old lead capsules  they're easier to remove than the plastic ones!)

After removing the capsule (usually we use a small knife, which is part of many corkscrews), we wipe clean the top of the bottle with a damp cloth because sometimes the cork is dark with mold that developed under the capsule. (That's actually a good sign; it means that the wine has been stored in humid conditions. See Chapter 21 for information on humidity and other aspects of wine storage.)

Why is my cork blue?

Have you ever opened a bottle of wine and discovered that the "cork" is not cork at all, but plastic and brightly colored, to boot?