How Not to Drink Wine

A True Story

Go to your refrigerator/cabinet/cellar and select your wine of choice. I recommend a nice, red burgundy. Take the bottle to your kitchen. Be sure you know where your corkscrew is so you do not have to spend ten minutes searching for it only to discover that it is in the first drawer you looked, hidden beneath the pizza cutter.

Be sure to think confident thoughts about opening the wine bottle. You have done this before and/or watched a relative or friend do it. It is not exactly rocket science, though it could be if the cork goes shooting one direction and the bottle in another. That being said, remove anything valuable or breakable from the area.

Take the knife part of the corkscrew and cut at the wax seal right above the part where the glass juts out. Cut all the way around it and then peel the wax seal off. If you did it correctly, you should have a nice cylinder with one open end. If you had to saw away at the rock-like wax for ten minutes and then peel half of it away, then cut your fingers on pulling off the other half, you should have a mess of crumple wax in your hand. Either way, the cork should now be exposed.

Put the knife away lest you cut your fingers and pull the curling part of the corkscrew out. Approach the cork at an angle and twist the entire length of metal into the cork. This is far harder to get straight than the sommelier at the restaurant makes it look. If you bump into glass walls, do not panic and call 911, but merely pull it back out and attempt to push it in from a different angle. You might want to call your high school geometry teacher if you are still having trouble. Do not call the sommelier… he will just laugh at you.

Once the corkscrew is buried in the cork so that it looks good from the outside, you should put the rectangular-ish metal piece down and use its leverage to neatly pull the cork out. Of course, that piece is arranged in just such a way that it does not meet evenly with the glass rim. After a few attempts to make it work, give up and attempt to pull the cork out by sheer force. Twisting it a bit might help. Do this either until you are drenched in sweat and your muscles are trembling so hard, you cannot lift your arms or until the cork is out two millimeters from the bottle.

At this point, you might be able to line the rectangular piece up and use its leverage to get a centimeter or two more. Of course, this causes it to be pulled sideways and the cork should split right down the middle, leaving half buried in the wine bottle and half still on your corkscrew. At this point you should either give up and call your Mom or be stupid and attempt to get the other half out.

Twist the corkscrew into the other half of the cork. This should fail miserably by pushing the cork deeper into the wine. Of course, if by some miracle this actually works, attempt to pull the cork father up in the narrow stem of the bottle. This will fail and you will end up ripping little pieces of cork out. Throw these down the sink or in the trashcan. You should at this point give up any notion you may have had of saving this cork to add to your collection.

If you really want to drink this wine, you should continue at the point. If you have any sanity left, you should stop. It is up to you. You could always go to that restaurant and just order a wine that the sommelier will open for you. This might not be the best course of action, as the ease with which he will open the bottle will cause your self-esteem to plummet to never before reached depths.

Twist the corkscrew into the pitiful remains of the cork and continue ripping up small pieces until the corkscrew refuses to stay in the cork because of all the holes in it. Make one last desperate attempt which will cause what you have been attempting to avoid for the past half hour to happen. The cork will fall into the wine. You should now remember that the sommelier told you that if the wine has any pieces of cork in it, you should throw it away.

By following this far, you have already proved yourself to be a foolish individual, so you will take a decent-sized bowl out of the cabinet and pour the wine into it to see if it is salvageable. After all, the cork has only been in the wine for the five minutes in which you were screaming of frustration. Several pieces of cork of various sizes should be floating on the surface of the wine. The biggest piece should still be stuck in the bottom of the bottle. You should give up any hope of saving the bottle as well as the cork at this point.

Take a normal spoon out of the cabinet and scoop the largest of the floating cork pieces out of the wine. This will cause you to get some wine on the spoon too, but some things cannot be avoided. Throw these down the sink unless you want your trashcan to smell like an alcoholic is living in it for the rest of the week. Only when the surface is relatively clear of cork pieces should you move on the next step.

Look from the bowl of wine to your wine glass and back in slight confusion. Wonder for about three minutes whether you should just drink the wine from the bowl… or whether you should drink it at all. Of course, by this point you have proved yourself to not only be foolish, but someone clearly dropped you on your head as a small child. However, stupid people get brilliantly stupid ideas, so go to your silverware drawer and pull out your ice cream scooper.

Use this to ladle the wine into your wine glass. Conveniently forget that the sommelier said that it is bad to shake wine. If the wine still smells okay, you can drink it. However, now you have a bowl of wine sitting on your kitchen counter which might look rather odd when your spouse/kids/roommate comes home. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and hide it. This is a doubly important step if your dad, who happens to be a famous sommelier and wine distributor, is in town and visiting you. If that is the case, you might as well just kill yourself now.

At this point, you are done and you have a glass of wine with only a few very small pieces of cork floating in it to show for your troubles. Drink it if you want… if you have come this far, I am sure you have earned it. Whatever you do, do not get your laptop out and write a story about what an idiot you are and post it online for the entire world to see. Go to the restaurant and persuade the sommelier to teach you how to open a wine bottle. Wait a while after drinking the wine to go there though. You definitely do not want a DUI on top of your traumatizing ordeal.

Once you finish your glass (assuming you stayed home), you should have a massive stomachache from drinking cork. Do everyone a favor and please find the air freshener before you have diarrhea. Best of luck!