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Anthropological Observations

To see how the corkscrews are used in a professional environment we went to a wine bar on Walnut Street in Shadyside. We’ve stayed there to watch the waiter work, how she opens the bottles and then asked her and the tenant some questions. They told us some interesting information.

First of all they had to types of corkscrew. The first type was a wing corkscrew. They said that they don’t use it that much compared to the connoisseurs’ one (wine key). According the tenant the key has the advantage to be really easy to use and light. It’s easy for the waiter to carry it with her which is an important feature because most of the bottles are opened at the tables. Despite these advantages the wine key it need some practice to be used correctly and quickly (the waitress told us that when she started to work she practiced at home). Moreover sometimes the lever doesn’t stand correctly on the bottle lip, especially if this one is round, which is really inconvenient and could leads in the worst case to spill the wine on the customer. The last problem that the waitress had with this type of corkscrew is that after having opened some bottles the hinge that hold the lever get a bit loose which leads to a bad alignment of the screw.

Another point that we see during our observation is that when the waitress cut the foil she doesn’t cut it from the side of the bottle but from top. She sticks the blade on the top of the bottleneck and then cut the upper part with a circular motion. See next picture :

She also told us that the knife from the wine key gets blunt pretty fast.

Concerning the bottles themselves, 30 percent of the ones drunk in the bar were closed with caps. What is more when they open a bottle just for a glass they reclose it by putting the cork back in. Usually a bottle doesn’t stay open more than a day.

The last subject that we approach was electrical corkscrew. The waitress told us that her mother has one because it didn’t require any force to open the bottle, which is what elderly people are looking for. However she said that this type of corkscrew seems really complicated and that it takes way too long to pull the cork out.

User Reviews on internet

The main problems that the users encounter with the lever arm corkscrew is that after several use the screw don’t work properly. Most of the time it turns on the way back up which doesn’t pull the cork out of the bottle : the corkscrew become useless. What also appear in the reviews is that this kind of corkscrew is heavy and not easy to operate. “Heavy, awkward to handle and broke after twenty uses.” What also came out of the review is that the motion is not really smooth. “In my opinion, this is a very poorly made opener. The manufacturing/assembly tolerances are very sloppy and the action of the opener is not smooth.” On the other hand some reviews are quite positive about the corkscrew saying that it is easy to use and require less force than a usual corkscrew.

About the wine key, the comments were that it is light, easy to use and quick. However one of the main problem is that after some time the hinge get loose and the alignment of the screw is not perfect anymore. That makes it tougher to open the bottle and stresses more the corks, which can even leads to break it.

Concerning the prong cork the reviews say it is difficult to use but once you got used to it is easy really useful to open broken corks or old bottles. However many reviews point out that because of the prongs thickness it is very likely to push the cork in the bottle.