The 3 Best Corkscrews for Opening Wine of 2025
Many corkscrew styles are available, ranging from simple wing models — where the worm (the metal helix that is driven into the cork) runs perpendicular to a wood handle — to electronic beasts that do all the work for you at the push of a button.
But we’ve interviewed a number of wine servers and sommeliers — people who open bottle after bottle, night after night — over the years, along with many other experts, and again and again they told us that a double-hinged corkscrew — specifically the Pulltap’s corkscrew — is the way to go.
As James Beard Award–nominated sommelier Michael McCaulley told us years ago, you can think of a wine opener like a hammer. Sure, there are nail guns, but if you’re just driving one nail, they’re not really necessary.
“For home use, simple is best,” Ray Isle, Food & Wine’s longtime executive wine editor, told us years ago. “I still prefer a waiter’s corkscrew to anything else.”
Waiter’s corkscrews go by many different names: sommelier knife, waiter’s friend, and wine key among them.
They’re often quite small, with the Pulltap’s style folding down to about 5 inches long and less than half an inch wide. And they generally include a small blade for removing the foil, as well as a bottle opener for popping the top off a beer.
“Double-hinged” refers to the metal lever that folds out from the body of the corkscrew and sits against the mouth of the bottle. You might also see this style referred to as a double lever.
The double-lever arrangement gives you leverage from two positions, which is especially helpful for removing longer corks.
Single-hinged or -levered options are available too, but they don’t offer as much leverage and therefore require more yanking.
Of course, the “simple is best” rule has exceptions. It takes a certain amount of dexterity and strength to twist in a corkscrew and pull out a cork, even when you have plenty of leverage. If you find a waiter’s corkscrew difficult to use, you might prefer an electric corkscrew, which does all the work for you.
