8 votes

What a wine opener tells us about a wine drinker

3 comments

  1. [3]
    scherlock
    Link
    I inherited my father's wine collection. The cork on the older bottles all crumble. Butlers friends,.cork screws all fail. The Durand is just expensive pretentious garbage, I borrowed one once....

    I inherited my father's wine collection. The cork on the older bottles all crumble. Butlers friends,.cork screws all fail. The Durand is just expensive pretentious garbage, I borrowed one once. The 20 dollar bottle pump will work every time and the cork won't crumble while being removed.

    9 votes
    1. [2]
      pallas
      Link Parent
      I've never used a Durand, but have always been a bit confused by them. In my experience with very crumbly corks, usually on old vintage ports, they'll crumble from the action of screwing in the...

      I've never used a Durand, but have always been a bit confused by them. In my experience with very crumbly corks, usually on old vintage ports, they'll crumble from the action of screwing in the corkscrew, not just pulling on the cork, and so seem just as likely to crumble with the Durand's corkscrew half as anything else. The failure mode of a twin-prong puller with a fragile cork, on the other hand, is usually pushing the cork down, so while the Durand might make this less likely by inserting the prongs when the corkscrew is holding the cork, if the cork is crumbly already from the corkscrew, it just seems like it risks putting it under further stress.

      I haven't seen bottle pump openers before, and those do seem rather fascinating, though I'd worry a bit about safety? In order to actually draw out the cork by pressurizing the bottle would require significantly more pressure than, say, a Coravin, and there are already concerns about safety there, when dealing with very old bottles.

      4 votes
      1. scherlock
        Link Parent
        Nope, very little pressure, two pumps and it starts coming out, the oldest bottle I have is from the 70s, I opened another bottle from that era without issue, the wine wasn't good IMHO, but the...

        Nope, very little pressure, two pumps and it starts coming out, the oldest bottle I have is from the 70s, I opened another bottle from that era without issue, the wine wasn't good IMHO, but the cork came out in tact, though crumbled when I rolled it between my fingers.

        6 votes