Y’all Are Obsessed With Wine Glassware and Corkscrews But They’re Simpler Than You Think

This is everything you need to know about the two most asked-about wine paraphernalia

Every time I talk about corkscrews in my articles, it’s always the top highlight.

People will take to the comments section and discuss hollow corkscrews vs. solid. Winged corkscrews vs. waiter’s friends.

And if TokTik is anything to go by, y’all seem extremely concerned with glassware. If a Somm has put out a video about glassware, it’s consistently their most-watched clip.

Take it from me, a Somm who has opened and poured thousands of bottles of wine into scores of different types of glassware.

There is only one type of glass you need to know about and only one type of corkscrew.

Let’s put this issue to bed. Then hopefully never talk about it again.

The only corkscrew you’ll ever need

The double reach. AKA Waiter’s Friend. They look like this:

The reason they’re so good — and why you’ll see every single Somm using nothing but — is that they make minimal mess with minimal fuss.

There’s a reason why they’re called a Waiter’s Friend.

They are so common in the wine industry that companies often give them away. My favourite one — the one sat in my drawer right now — was gifted to me by a Spanish wine board.

In other words, they don’t have to — in fact, shouldn’t — be expensive.

But they do need this:

• A sharp foil cutter so you don’t cut your hand like I did the other day on a friend’s substandard corkscrew.
• A thin, strong helix with a sharp end so you can point and screw with precision.
• A reassuringly sturdy body which doesn’t threaten to bend and snap at the first sign of contact. This is not Legally Blonde.

The only time Waiter’s Friends are not your friend is when you’re dealing with decades-old wine with a crumbling cork. And I suspect few of you are drinking these on the regular.

99.9% of the time, the Waiter’s Friend is perfect.

Hellish corkscrews make for a hellish time

Hell for a Somm would be a place filled with the most exciting wines known to man and these types of corkscrews:

The winged fancy

Often found in $1 stores made from the flimiest plastic known to man, all these do is fuck up the cork and require a ton of pulling at the end because the helix is always too short.

The hernia-maker

True story — my dad exacerbated a hernia by using one of these:

The Automator

If you have mobility issues, these are great. If you’re able-bodied, c’mon, no one needs another expensive wine toy when a $5 Waiter’s Friend does the same thing — and is portable.

And finally…the Coravin

If the above corkscrews are the seventh circle of hell, using a Coravin — a gadget which inserts a needle into the cork, extracts wine, and allows the cork to close back up — is the sixth.

It’s an amazing gadget in principle but in reality, unless you own a wine bar that wants to sell fancy wine by the glass, it’s $250 that would be better spent on anything else.

Ideally wine.

The only glass you’ll ever need…

…isn’t a specific glass at all, but a shape.

One that looks like this:

Medium-sized, an angle to the bowl, tapered at the top with enough room to get a swirl on.

They don’t have to cost a fortune, I’ve picked up glasses like these on my travels for less than $2. If you want to invest in quality, the best ones are around $20 or $30 from Austrian and German glass companies like Zalto, Gabriel, Riedel and Schott Zwiesel.

The worst sort of glasses are those bistro-style ones you see in Italian restaurants. Something like this:

Controversially (outside of the wine trade at least) I also hate oversized glasses. The general wisdom may be to stick your big red wines into glasses the size of C-cups but take it from me, it’s bollocks. Those glasses are designed to release aromas, but big red wines already have that in spades. And the bigger the glass, the more you’ll smell the volatile compounds of wine, like alcohol.

Shit glasses will make all wine taste like a Two-Buck Chuck. But a good glass can actually improve a mediocre wine. Sure, it’s not going to turn A $15 liquor store Cabernet Sauvignon into Screaming Eagle, but it is going to give it a fighting chance to show off the best of itself.

Wine glasses make all the difference because they manipulate the wine’s aroma and flavour compounds. Buy the right ones and you’re instantly going to have a better wine time.

As for the rest of you wine gadgets…

You’re not needed. Sorry.

Aerators

Want to aerate your wine? Pour out a small glass, re-cork and shake the bottle.

You don’t need some gadget. You just need air and ideally time.

$200 decanters

I was once gifted a $400 decanter by a fancy company that I NEVER used because it was truly ridiculous both in shape and size.

I don’t need to overcompensate for anything, thank you very much.

If you want a decanter (and they can be super useful), you don’t need much. My favourite was always a small $30 glass jug that was small enough to fit in the fridge.

Either that or do what I’ve seen one of the most respected winemakers in the world do and use a sieve over a plastic jug, not dissimilar to this:

The ugly truth about sulfite removers

They don’t work because they only remove the free sulphites in a wine, when plenty of sulphites are also bound and thus cannot be removed.

If you’re concerned about sulfites, buy no added sulfite or natural wines. They are naturally lower in sulfites and are often made by small producers so you can chalk up points on your karmic scoreboard whilst enjoying great wine at the same time.

Air removal wine stoppers

You might have seen these, little plastic wine stoppers with a small hand pump used to remove the air from the wine.

Whilst these can be useful, I’ve never found they keep wine in much better than storing open bottles in the fridge. We’re talking both white and red, folks.

Talk about glassware, corkscrews and other wine gadgets is really distracting from the very thing they’re designed to enhance.

Wine.

Keep it simple. Buy some tapered wine glasses. Buy a Waiter’s Friend corkscrew. Spend $50 — or less — and you can forget about the rest of it.

By my reckoning, I’ve just saved you about $400 on decanters, glassware and fancy corkscrews. That’s a lot of decent fermented grape juice you can buy there.

I’ll see you down the wine store.

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