My name is Kasia Tomecka and I have been in the Food and Beverage industry for 18 years. I’ve been really lucky to have had many great wine jobs, but my favorite one is my current position that I’ve had for about 4 years as an Educator at the Capital Wine School in DC. I have my Diploma in Wine Studies and am a WSET Certified Educator.
I was recently interviewed by part of our ABC Seven on Your Side local news team regarding wine openers. It’s funny to think about how a lot of people spend so much time talking about which wine to choose, but no one really talks about how to finally get into that great bottle! There are a lot of methods for opening bottles (the easiest of course being buying a bottle with a screwcap closure) but with technological advances, how do we know which openers are best, and how do you know what’s worth the investment?
I tried a variety of openers with the new team simply to show how to use them: from a $5 handheld opener that we call a waiter’s corkscrew all the way to a $300 Coravin that can pour wine without actually opening it. (While a very neat gadget, definitely not a must-have for the average person.) The VinoPop which is a new product on the market was fun and easy to use, plus it makes the fun “Pop” noise with every open. It seemed to work great, but it did not fit on one bottle we tried so you should always have a back-up option. For $20 it seemed like the easy choice for an average person: no batteries and not complicated to use.
You could spend more money to get a fancy opener like a rechargeable Houdini for $40, or a Rabbit opener for $50, but you’re already spending money on the wine! Why waste extra on something you don’t really need? In the end, I still always reach for my waiter’s corkscrew that I’ve been using for years. I guess I just like doing the extra few seconds of work and feeling connected to the bottle. But no matter which tool you use to get the bottle open, hopefully you won’t be too worried about it to enjoy the wine inside! Cheers.
