You see, in all 77+ of the Bill Wilson podcasts, there were none that appeared to give a true wine newbie the secrets of uncorking the bottle in a professional manner. I had to turn elsewhere for guidance.
According to the book, Wine for Dummies, all waiters use what's known as a "waiter's corkscrew" or "waiter's wine key." When folded, it looks like a swiss army knife, and when unfolded, it looks like this:
You use the blade (on the right above) to cut the foil from around the top. Then you screw in the "worm," then you somehow use leveraging action to remove the cork.
I've never been good with tools, so exactly how the leveraging action worked was not clear to me. I found a couple of YouTube videos that gave a good demonstration of the "two-stage method." However, the two-stage method requires a corkscrew with a longer lever-part, as shown on the left in this diagram:
See the difference? (Look closely). Apparently you use the first groove on the left lever to do the "tricky initial pull" on the corkscrew. Then you stop, shift the lever to position the second groove on the lip of the bottle, and finish pulling the cork the rest of the way out. That's the guaranteed fool-proof method shown in this video, and also in this video, which features a waitress-in-training named Melissa, also known as the "July Drink-Art Girl."
Melissa is about nineteen and cute, but she is wearing a spaghetti-strap top that looks like it might have fit her in second grade. In her case, that's no doubt a man magnet. In my case, after bearing two children, the tummy is no longer in the category of "body parts for public display."
In contrast, The Perfect Server video episode on serving beverages shows Jane wearing a crisp and professional long-sleeved waiter's shirt. Jane uses the shorter-lever, one-stage wine key and pulls out the cork in a single, fluid, elegant motion.
I want to be like Jane.
I drove to the gourmet kitchen store and asked for a waiter's wine key. They had a large selection, and the saleswoman guided me to the "Waiter's Friend," Argyle Professional Corkscrew. A one-stage wine key. "This is the most popular one," she said. "You know, for those in the business. Because it's so small and goes easily in your pocket."
The way she said "in the business" sold me, and at $11.99 it was well in budget.
Back at home, I retrieved our remaining two bottles of wine, purchased back in the days before we quit drinking it. I re-watched Jane on the video and then made my first attempt.
It failed, but it was not all my fault. Something had happened to the seal, and the corkscrew began to turn inside the neck of the bottle. When I finally --and very inelegantly-- forced it out, it was wet from the bottom of the cork to the top: a clear sign that the seal had gone bad. (As I have learned from Bill Wilson, this is the real reason the waiter presents the cork to the diner: the diner is supposed to check that the cork is wet on the bottom end and dry on the top. Dry on both ends is bad, as is wet all the way to the top. The notion that the diner is supposed to sniff the cork is a myth.)
I poured the bad wine down the drain and moved on to bottle number two: a 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon. Once again, I carefully cut through and removed the foil, and then screwed the worm inside the cork.
Now it was time for the leveraging action.
Perhaps I had screwed it in too far, perhaps the cork was crumbly from age, perhaps I am so uncoordinated that I will never be a Jane: for one reason or another the cork broke in two, with the bottom third of it still in the neck of the bottle when all the leveraging action was over. Further extraction attempts were futile, and I finally poked the rest of the cork down into the bottle with a spoon handle.
This did not bode well for my career move.
I was too humiliated to go back to the kitchen store and admit I needed a fool-proof Melissa-type corkscrew. So I drove out to a nearby winery.
They had lots of decorative, gifty-type corkscrews, but nothing that looked like a two-stage waiter's key. I went up to the wine-tasting bar, where there were no customers at the moment, and asked the two women behind the bar for help.
Both of them were much older and better-dressed than Melissa, and one even had an exotic foreign accent -- European? South American? Hard for me to tell. I showed her my Argyle professional purchased earlier that day.
She shook her head and said sympathetically. "Oh no. Those are the bad ones. Come, I show you."
She walked over to a cupboard at the back of the bar and pulled out a simple styrofoam box. Inside were very plain-looking wine keys. "Pick a color," she said.
I chose blue.
"I open hundreds of bottles of wine," she said, "all the time. This the only kind I use. Watch."
She pulled out a bottle and unfolded the wine key.
To my dismay, I saw that it was another single-stage key, not the double-stage foolproof kind I was hoping for. However, it her hands it entered the cork effortlessly. She set the hinged part of the lever on the lip of the bottle, and pushed the bottle over to me.
"Try."
A bit clumsily, I attempted the leveraging action.
The cork slid out.
"You see!" she proclaimed. "Only kind you need."
I looked closer at the tool. There was nothing on it but the word "ITALY" stamped in the metal.
It must be good, I thought. It has the name of a European country on it, and it's recommended by a woman with a European (I decided it was European) accent. I had come looking for a double-stage wine key that even Melissa could use, but here was one that promised to make me a Jane.
And it was exactly half the price of the Argyle Professional.
So tonight I will make my second attempt at professional wine bottle uncorking. The only problem is that we're having hot-dog-and-crescent-rolls for dinner, and I'm not sure what wine goes with that. Bill Wilson says that Pinot Noir is the ultimate in versatile wines, so perhaps that's what I'll try. I'll also get a bottle of champagne, since learning to open those is my next learning challenge....
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