Getting out very old corks

Yeah, you need one of those Chinese made gizmos they carry at the better wine shops. Very useful for extracting a cork you've pushed into the bottle by accident while trying to get it out with a Screwpull, Ah-So or whatever.

It has three long wires with an inward facing bracket at the end of each. You hook the bottom side of the cork with it and just pull the entire mess out of the bottle. There'll still be cork detritus floating in the bottle, but I'm sure you can handle that.

Tom S.

I have managed to extract corks from bottles from the 1920's with the classic double blade cork remover. You slip one prong in and with a gentle oscillationg motion you get the two prongs right down between the necc and the cork and gently pull.

Mike

Mike Tommasi, Six Fours, France email link

Tom's and Mike's are good. But they forgot to mention the liberal use of your favorite curse word. Doesn't necessarily make the cork go more smoothly, but you generally feel better...

Take the standard screwpull, but only T-top with worm, leave off the bell-shaped other part. Screw in totally, and pull out very gently. I found this method working best.

M.

Salut/Hi Michael Pronay,

le/on 4 May 2004 07:24:56 GMT, tu disais/you said:-

You took the words out of my mouth. I _have_ known even that method sometimes can pull the middle out of a VERY decayed cork, but one can often feel the softness on the way in, and cant the screw over for a second attempt to try to get the pull over a wider section of the cork. But at the end of the day, if the cork is truly stuck and rotten the only answer it sot decant through a little stainless steel sieve. It might be better to remove as much of the cork as possible, and also to clean up the outside meticulously before trying.

Btw, working with the bottle posed in a decanting craddle or basket will minimize the risk of cork pieces falling into the wine.

M.

Whilst I usually use a Leverpull I have a very old

- Victorian, I think - barrel type corkscrew which has a very very close shallow angled thread on it so that it needs many turns both to get into the cork and to pull it out. Modern versions often concentrate on speed and this one winse because it not only goes into the cork gently and in so many places that it seems to hold it together but also pulls it out very slowly and gently.

I have seen modern corkscrews in specialist shops which have the same feature and would recommend anyone to have a similar one for older bottles. It is especially good with port bottles and I wonder if that was what it was made for originally.

I think that's the same as the AH-SO. I have a vintage double helix corkscrew that works well on old croks. They're hard to find but invaluable if you can locate one. It's basically a traditional corkscrew with two side by side screws. It has double the "bite" for old crumbly corks. Bi!!

I have a polymer micro screen filter that slips into the neck that I use for VP and wines with cork and sediment. IT works like a pourer and even has a little snap on cap to close it when not pouring. Bi!!

Far be it from me to contravene the advice of you two, but in my experience a high quality "waiter's friend" a la Laguiole has been the most effective at removing a rotten cork. I find that using it on a slight bias actually seems to improve the removal. However, my experience pales in comparison to that of you both, so I will quietly recede into the background...

Mark Lipton

Ah, yes. That would be a vintage 1953 Watson & Crick. Much superior to the more complicated Linus Pauling, which had three helices...

S moT

Laguiole is the second best to a tabletop screwpull. The reasons for me preferring screwpull are quite simple: First, the screwpull coil has an even larger "envergure" (= diameter) than a Laguiole, although not by very much, which means that the forces applicated within in the cork apply more to the bottle neck than a Laguiole (and even less than a standard waiter's friend); second - but that's a very personal experience that might not be shared by others -, my Laguiole is my standard working corkscrew, so the original teflon coating is long gone, while my seldom used screwpull still sees 90% of its coating intact, which means that it screws into a potentially disintegrating cork much smoother.

But, I agree: This applies very, very old corks - over 50 years old - *only*, while I have absolutely no problem using my Laguiole for everything younger than that.

M.

One sometimes finds an old cork that is very soft and crumbles very easily, but also nearly seems to be glued to the neck of the bottle. These can be a real problem. You sometimes have to "mine" out the top portions of the cork, especially the parts that are stuck to the glass of the neck. Sometimes when about half of the cork is mined out, you can put a corkscrew in on a slant and extract the remaining cork without bits remaining stuck to the glass. I once had to spend about 15 minutes removing such a problem cork.

Another way is to use port tongs. I have port tongs, but they seem to be difficult to find now. My problem is the part of the iron that fits around the neck must be heated to a very high temperature, and my electric range does not work for this. I have to start a charcoal grill and heat the irons on the glowing charcoal. Thus I nearly never use the tongs. However they are quite fast and effective once they are hot enough. You just clamp them around the neck of the bottle for a short time, remove them, and rapidly apply a very wet rag around the heated area. The neck cracks off cleanly, and you just lift the neck containing the cork off of the bottle. Port tongs were much more practical when many homes had a fireplace, coal or wood fueled range, etc. going much of the time so that the tongs could be heated rapidly without a lot of fuss.

Wouldn't an electric heated set of port tongs be a nifty wine-geek toy? Does anyone make such a thing?

Tom S

I'm sure I'm being very crude & uncouth for even suggesting this, but I just get what I can with my screwpull, then push the rest of the cork into the bottle, and decant (mesh filter on the funnel catches any small pieces of cork along with the sediment from a wine that old). While pouring into the decanter, I push something (the only use I have for an ah-so) down the neck of the bottle to prevent it from blocking the wine.

Wy not just push the whole cork into the bottle then? Less to filter I would think (I don't have any 40 YO bottles so I'm just replying to the above suggestion :).

George Cox

Because once you get problems with a crumbling cork, you can bet that you will get exactly the same problems trying to push the cork into the bottle: the middle part will crumble into the wine, while the outer face will stick to the glass as if it was melted to it.

M.

Me either, but I've had the same problem with much younger bottles. My oldest right now is about 16 yo.

Four problems with your suggestion:

1. The preferred method, of course, is to get the whole thing out, cleanly and neatly, with a screwpull. You don't know whether this will work until you've tried it, at which time it will be too late. And I'm not going to default to pushing it in because I think that maybe it'll break when I try to pull it out.
2. I've never tried to push an entire cork in, but I imagine it'd be much harder than pushing in just the part that breaks off.
3. If the cork is brittle enough to break when I pull it, then it's probably brittle enough to break along the sides when I try to push it in.
4. I don't know if having less to filter really gains me anything. I pour the entire bottle through the filter and into the decanter anyway, so why do I care how many cork fragments are floating in the wine? The filter will catch whatever is there without any greater effort on my part.

Larry Coon wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@assist.org:

As one who has resorted to pushing corks many times when in college and in the army-Necessity is the mother of invention, it is not the difficult but can be messy if you don't ease up the pressure at just the last moment. You actually get very little cork breakage this way so there is less than if one repeatedly forced the corksrew down the cork breaking of a little more each time