Best of the Best

Opening a bottle of wine is opening up a whole new world. The wine itself is the purpose and getting to the wine as quickly as possible without damaging the bottle, the cork or allowing strange non-wine things to enter your bottle is the goal. Luckily, there are as many ways to open a bottle of wine as there are bottles of wine and they run from elegant, to practical, to just plain fun. The corkscrew, the wing-style, the pump, the two pronged, the machine - all are simple and even attractive implements with different styles. There’s even a way to open a bottle of wine without using any tool at all except your very own hands.

But if wine is art, and it most assuredly is, at least much of it, then so are wine openers. Like cutlery and cooking utensils, it’s fairly easy to get carried away and spend a great deal of money on an opener. Everyone is different and seeks different ways to pursue the de-corking of their bottles and so the market bears a great many opportunities to express oneself.

Generally, the most extravagant wine openers are the hand-held and portable kind. Made from every material imaginable, corkscrews, as they are commonly called, are handcrafted, designed individually, and even engraved with personal information in some cases. Still, handheld isn’t the only way to go. There are table top openers, machine openers, openers that come with CO2 cartridges and open bottles in a split second, even openers that bear a small resemblance to woodland animals and are thusly named. Which one is best for you? The answer depends on your wine drinking habits. Do you mostly drink wine at home? Do you go portable mostly? Do you open many bottles at one time or just one at a time? The answers to these questions will help you decide which opener you’ll need.

The following is a list of wine openers from extravagant to simple, from practical to fun.