These days I don’t mind opening a bottle of wine that has a screw top. Ten years ago that would have been a different story. Bottles that had screw tops then usually contained cheap, very sweet, and bad-tasting wines. Today more and more wineries are deciding that the screw top is the way to go on wines that are meant to be drunk within a year’s time. Why put a cork in the wine that has no aging potential, when estimates are that one in ten wines goes bad because of a defective cork? A screw top wine is not going to have that problem.
Last week we went to a neighborhood restaurant and ordered a bottle of wine that happened to have a screw top. You would think this would be a piece of cake for a beginning server to open compared to standing in front of us attempting to use a waiter’s corkscrew for the first time. This server for the life of himself could not manage the screw top. I politely told him that I drink plenty of these at home and I know an easy way to open the screw top. If he is having this problem, others must be also. This prompted me to make a slide video showing the proper way to open a bottle of wine with a screw top.
Open that Screw Top Bottle of Wine from Joe Becerra on Vimeo.
On a finally note, those weird-looking plastic fake corks really annoy me. Are the wineries trying to fool us into thinking that because we have to use a corkscrew, this is a better wine than a screw-top wine? I found these corks harder to extract and often they do damage to a corkscrew. Put screw tops on the wines, and throw the fake corks away.
If you have a tip for opening screw-top wines, make sure you let us know.
