How to Open a Wine Bottle Without a Corkscrew

The heat shrink is the first barrier to entry. A decent wine key will have a blade for removing the shrink wrap. You can scrape it off pretty easily with any sharp object, even if it's not pretty.

A lot of modern wine bottles have a pull tab, which can make things a little easier.

If you happen to have a butter knife, press it up under the bottom of the rim and twist the bottle against the serrated edge. This actually works quite well.

What's more, a butter knife may be your best option to dig the cork out. But you will have to get lucky and have the right width of butter knife, and you will need to get the knife as deeply embedded in the cork as possible. You may need to flip the bottle over and give the knife a few whacks on the ground to drive it in, which could easily damage the knife or the bottle.

If you can get a butter knife into your cork, but you cant twist it hard enough to move the cork, a strong fork might help. Slide the blades between the twines and use it as a lever. A week fork will bend though, and if you don't get the knife in deep enough, chances are you're going to destroy the cork.

This is one of the most effective solutions. Get the screw as deep into the cork as possible. A screw with a wide coil will work best. For a narrow screw, you may need two, or you could wind up just ripping the screw out of the cork.

Scissors aren't the worst option, but they can be dangerous. If you can get one of the blades deep enough into the bottle, you can fold the scissors opened and use one leg as a lever to start twisting the cork out. Again, you're pretty lucky if you can get the cork out without destroying it or yourself, but even so, you can probably get enough of it out that you can press the rest of the cork into the bottle. You'll just have to live with drinking some cork bits.

Please don't try this without eye protection. The theory here is that if you apply heat to the bottle, beneath the cork, you might be able to expand the air in the bottle enough to kick out the cork.

This also mostly doesn't work. Modern wine bottles have a minimal amount of air in the space between the cork and the wine and they're sealed pretty tight. To build enough pressure to blow the cork off, you'll have to start boiling off some of the wine, which is obviously not really great for the wine.

What's more, as you heat the air in the bottle, you also heat the bottle, which weakens the bottle at one small region. So again, this method might just explode the bottle. A butane torch would be more effective, but it will also increase the likelihood of exploding the bottle.

One of the worst options. Put the butt of the bottle in a shoe. Bang it against a hard surface. This will take, literally forever. 45 minutes at least of hard work and there is the obvious chance that you will shatter the bottle at some point along the way.

This technique is popular online because it looks cool in post production (once you edit out the 45 minutes). Every once in awhile, you'll get a bottle of wine with a loose cork that will come right out, but this is rare and most often occurs in old bottles of wine. If you have a nice, old bottle of wine, do you really want to bang it against a wall for 45 minutes?

I went with a shoe with a thinner sole that would absorb less of the shock. So I increased the likelihood of breaking the bottle and still saw no results after several minutes of banging it on the sidewalk. This method really makes no sense.