The Best Corkscrew for Opening Wine

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.

It’s been years since Wirecutter’s Nick Guy rigorously and comprehensively tested corkscrews. But this is not a category with a lot of technological innovation. We’re confident that our picks are still great.

If you can find a Pulltap’s corkscrew in person, great. It should run about $10. But buying one online is more expensive (direct from the manufacturer in Spain, it’s about $17 with shipping), and knockoffs are rampant.

So we set out to find the Pulltap’s corkscrew design from a more reliable, less expensive source and tested eight options.

We tested each corkscrew by, well, opening bottles of wine. They all worked exactly the same.

None of the openers fell apart, and none broke the cork. The double hinge makes a big difference by providing so much leverage.

We also wanted to find a good option for people who find it difficult to use a waiter’s corkscrew; we tested five models. Those were mainly electric options but also included one corkscrew that uses a lever system and one that removes corks using pressurized gas.

After testing these openers, we still think most people will be happiest with a simple manual corkscrew, as they’re easy to use, portable, and easy to store. But we have an electric pick for those who prefer it.

While True’s Truetap is a knockoff of the classic Pulltap’s corkscrew that experts unanimously recommended to us—really, identical save for the name engraved on the hinge—it’s a high-quality option with all the same benefits, and it’s much easier to reliably buy online for under $10.

It works easily and well. We nailed the process by the first bottle we tried to open, never broke the cork, and found the double hinge provided all the leverage we needed.

The worm also has a nonstick coating, which helps it slip in and out of corks a little easier than a stainless steel worm.

It’s basically the same as the classic Pulltap’s corkscrew. A True rep told us this years ago: “The Pulltap’s and Truetap are essentially the same product. We produce the Truetap, allowing us to pass along a better price to our customer as well as more color variety. Aside from the lower prices and color variety, there is no difference.” Holding the two models side by side, we found this to be totally true—although in the intervening years, Pulltap’s corkscrew has added more colors, so they are now about equal on that front.

But it’s easier and cheaper to reliably get. A Truetap looks and feels just like a Pulltap’s corkscrew, but it’s consistently available for less than $10 on Amazon.

It comes in a variety of colors. Burgundy, gold, metallic red, pink, navy blue, and on and on.

And the company seems trustworthy. Even though the various double-hinged Pulltap’s alternatives we tested seem to have no discernible differences, we recommend this model from an actual company with a standalone website and people you can talk to rather than from a fly-by-night third party on Amazon.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The Truetap requires a degree of physical strength and dexterity that some people may not possess. If that’s the case, consider the Oster Electric Wine Opener we discuss below.

Some people may not be thrilled with purchasing what’s perceived as a knockoff, but it is the best value, and it’s reliable.

Also, after years of our Truetap rattling around in a drawer in our test kitchen, some of the paint has chipped off its handle. If that’s the kind of thing that bothers you, opt for the unpainted stainless steel version.

The OXO SteeL Double Lever Waiter’s Corkscrew looks and feels more premium than our top pick.

It’s a bit bigger and more comfortable. It’s slightly larger than the Truetap Double-Hinged Waiter’s Corkscrew in all dimensions and just a bit heavier, so it has a pleasantly weighty feel in the hand. If you’ve used OXO kitchen tools before, the steel body and matte rubber handle will be very familiar.

The bonus features are especially nice too. The foil-cutting blade is rounded rather than straight and serrated, making for a smoother cut along the head of the bottle. The sturdy beer bottle opener at the other end is another nice bonus that’s easier to use than that of the Truetap.

It works a bit differently than the Truetap. The OXO corkscrew has a slightly different lever design.

Rather than having a flexible hinged lever like on the Truetap, the OXO corkscrew has a smaller center lever nested inside a longer outer one. When you’re using the corkscrew, the smaller lever retracts as you pull up on the corkscrew’s handle and extend the larger lever, so it’s out of the way when you’re not using it.

But in the end, its performance is basically the same as our top pick. The OXO corkscrew works just as well as the Truetap—which is to say, very smoothly. There’s little to no difference in how good they are at removing corks.

The Oster Electric Wine Opener is the best electric wine bottle opener we’ve tested.

It’s extremely easy to use. You simply center the bottom opening on top of the cork and press the button with your thumb while holding the bottle with your other hand. Once the corkscrew catches, the bottle opener drives its way down, at which point an internal mechanism begins to push against the neck of the bottle, lifting the cork.

Within about six or seven seconds, the cork will be removed from the bottle. You’ll feel it release and maybe even hear a small pop.

Simply hold the up button for a few more seconds to force the cork out and, well, that’s that.

The battery, motor, and foil cutter work well. The motor showed no signs of strain in our tests. Oster says the wine opener’s rechargeable battery lasts for 30 bottles before it needs recharging, but really, there’s no good reason not to return it to the plastic charging base, which holds the opener upright and stores the foil cutter, after each use.

Even the separate foil cutter was the best we tested.

But it is a bit loud. We didn’t find the sound output problematic, but some people might. We measured it at about 74 decibels from a distance of 11 inches, a little quieter than a power drill.

Oster offers a one-year limited warranty.

It sounds pretty straightforward, right? Pick up a Pulltap’s corkscrew, like so many experts recommend, and you’re all set.

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.

Pulltex claims its Pulltap’s corkscrew is the progenitor of the style. “We have designed the first double lever corkscrew, called Pulltap’s,” a company rep told us years ago. “Unfortunately for us, there are countless knockoff brands around the world.”

Indeed, a quick search on Amazon shows this to be true, with a sprawling list of models that claim to be the real thing.

It’s hard to actually find a Pulltap’s that you know is a Pulltap’s, at least in the US.

We’ve tried ordering models that advertised themselves as authentic Pulltap’s corkscrews from Amazon. They ranged in price from $2 to $10.

One came with no logo etched into the metal arm. One came with the Pulltap’s name and the phrase “Patent.” And the other took weeks to arrive from China. When it did, it also said “Pulltap’s,” but it wasn’t better than the other models we tried.

It’s difficult to say if any were authentic, because none of them came in Pulltex or Pulltap’s packaging.

In the end, we just can’t recommend buying a Pulltap’s corkscrew when it’s so hard to know you’re getting the real thing, and when the Truetap is so much easier to reliably get.

This is not a comprehensive list of every corkscrew we’ve ever tested, but simply some contenders that are still available.

The double lever on the Pulltex Pullparrot works differently: The inner step isn’t fixed but rather spring-loaded. It must be pushed in to be used, which adds a level of complexity to something that works fine without it. And, like the Pulltex Pulltap’s, this model can be difficult to find for a reasonable price online.

Waring Pro’s WO50B Cordless Wine Opener is similar to the Oster Electric Wine Opener we recommend but is a step down in a couple ways. It works the same way as the Oster, although it took a few seconds longer to open a bottle, at 8.5 seconds. And the wider diameter might be problematic for people with smaller hands.

The Ozeri Nouveaux II Electric Wine Bottle Opener houses a rechargeable battery, but it doesn’t have a charging dock. Instead, the included charger plugs directly into the back of the opener, which is not as easy as charging the Oster on its dock. We also found it somewhat difficult to get the corkscrew to catch the cork.

The Metrokane Vertical Rabbit is the most expensive opener we tested, which is somewhat surprising considering that it’s purely mechanical, with no electrical elements. It uses a handle that acts as a lever; you start with it raised, lower it over the cork, and lift it back up again before lowering it one more time to remove the cork. It took a lot of strength to raise the lever once the corkscrew was in the cork. It’s too big and complex without any real benefits.

The craziest wine bottle opener we tested was the Cork Pops Legacy. The smallest tool of the bunch, it’s a plastic housing on top of a long needle, with a canister of compressed air. To open a bottle, you push the needle through the cork and then push down on the canister, which forces air into the bottle, the pressure of which helps to remove the cork. During the first attempt to use it, we were shocked by just how quickly the cork popped out and how much wine splattered on us and the inside of the tool. There wasn’t as much of a mess the next time, but the somewhat-explosive force made us concerned.

When you’re ready to open a bottle, we found the method suggested by Gary Vaynerchuk (video), the founder of the Wine Library, about as easy as can be.

First, he shows that you can simply pull the foil off the bottle rather than cut it.

Then, place the worm in the center of the cork, and, rather than turning the opener, turn the bottle to start the drive.

Once the worm is in, turn the corkscrew the rest of the way—about five rotations total.

Use the mechanics of the lever to lift it, and your vino is ready to go.

If it seems challenging, don’t worry. It gets easier with practice.

Once the bottle is open, we’ve found that the best way to keep open wine fresh is to pick up a can of Private Preserve, recork it, and refrigerate it.

Nick Guy wrote an earlier version of this guide. This article was edited by Ben Frumin and Marguerite Preston.