by Martin Field

Corked wines are disgusting to drink. Less annoying, but common enough, are wines with bits of cork floating in them. Admittedly, cork crumbs are more a cosmetic than a taste problem but they’re very irritating when you find them in your glass.

My certifiable genius friend Kim, cast his beady mathematical eyes over a number of crumby wines. He observed that cork flotsam and jetsam appear most frequently when he uses a waiters knife to extract corks from older wines.

In the E-vine tasting lab he demonstrated, using a deluxe waiters knife on a 15-year-old bottle of wine, that just before the cork fully emerges from a bottle the waiters knife actually pushes the cork away from the perpendicular.

This leverage bends the wet end of the cork, and if the cork is unsound, causes it to break and shed crumbs. Consequently, small pieces of cork tend to stick in the bottle neck and fragments fall inside the bottle. These then have to be fished or filtered out. Or, chewed and swallowed.

To put it more simply: the structural integrity of a decomposing cork will be compromised as the waiters knife’s vectoring forces simultaneously compress and expand the wet end of the cork in opposite directions. Having lost the springiness of youth, the stressed cork will self-destruct.

Kim’s solution is to use an old-fashioned butterfly corkscrew when opening older wines. This type of corkscrew will extract the cork in a strictly vertical direction, avoiding destructive stresses and strains caused by sideways movement. He’s convinced me.

If you have a strong arm, a simple T-shaped corkscrew will also do the trick.