The Great Cork Debacle of 2008

I mentioned, in my post on Montauk, a little trouble I had with a cork. We had innocently enough bought a Long Island Viognier to sip with a little cheese and salami, and the day before, had purchased a $1 corkscrew from a Montauk town vineshop. Grabbing the wine cold out of the fridge, I inserted the corkscrew, and started pulling at it to remove the cork. A few second later, I had the plastic base of the corkscrew in my left hand, and a wine bottle including this cork in my right. A little tugging quickly convinced me that the broken metal screw wasn't about to come out of the plastic cork, or at least not without a lot of help.



I was, of course, too embarassed by all this to take up my girlfriend's idea of asking the hotel people for a pair of pliers, so I started trying a few much less logical methods that had the chief benefit of not having to talk to anyone. Unfortunately, they were mostly pretty stupid. It turns out, for example, that trying to stab through a plastic cork with a knife doesn't work. Nor, apparently, does trying to slip corn on the cob holders on the sides of the cork to try to imitate a double pronged cork remover work especially well. In fact, what it actually does is scratch the glass, leading to the hilarious possibility that you may now have glass shards in your white wine.

Finally, my girlfriend hit on the solution. Go buy a new corkscrew, and hook the new corkscrew's cork around the broken screw. Once it's attached, pull it out. Although I almost broke the new corkscrew in the process, it worked, coming out with a satisfying pop. As for what to do about the glass shards, I filtered the wine through a very fine coffee filter, after having discarded the idea of decanting the whole thing into a bowl and skimming the top (the logic being that the glass might sink) after deciding that the bowl was probably too shallow for that ploy even if the glass played along.

Given that we both feel fine a week later, I guess nothing bad happened. But the whole episode definitely delayed dinner.