The Best Ways to Open a Wine Bottle Without a Corkscrew (Ranked by Success Rate and Risk)

The trick almost nobody knows, and the reason the push-in method is not a dead end. Tie a fat knot in the end of a shoelace, feed the knot into the bottle past the floating cork, then tilt and work the bottle until the knot sits under the cork, and pull the lace up so the cork is dragged against the neck at an angle and squeezes back out. Fiddly and slow - five to ten minutes of patience - but it turns a ruined presentation back into a normal bottle.

The most-shared method on the internet and roughly the sixth-best. Bottle base into the heel of a flat-soled shoe, then strike the shoe against a wall so the wine hammers the cork out a few millimetres per hit. It does work - NPR tested it, got the bottle open, and called it not pretty. It also takes real effort, sprays wine if you overshoot, and the sommeliers who teach it warn against a hard, unyielding wall - that is how bottles break.

Sink a serrated blade into the cork at a slight angle, then rotate the bottle rather than the knife and lift as the cork rides up the serrations. On a young, springy cork this is quick and clean. On an older one the blade shreds it and you end up with cork in the wine plus a knife you are levering against glass with your hand wrapped around the neck. It has the worst injury profile on this list relative to how ordinary and unthreatening it looks.

Worth knowing because it explains the two hacks below it. Port tongs are heated red in a flame, clamped around the neck for twenty to thirty seconds, then the hot ring is hit with a wet cloth or ice water and the glass fractures cleanly along the thermal gradient. Sommeliers use them on old fortified bottles whose corks would crumble under a screw, and the break is clean and predictable, with any fragments filtered out during decanting.

Push a pump needle through the middle of the cork until you feel it break through into the air gap, then pump slowly - three or four strokes usually walks the cork far enough up to grab by hand. The physics are sound; the failure mode is not. You are deliberately pressurising a sealed glass container, so pump slowly, keep the neck pointed away from faces, and do not do this to a bottle that has been in a cellar for a decade.

Stand the neck of the bottle in a jug of hot tap water - hot, not boiling - for a few minutes and let the air in the headspace expand enough to walk the cork upward. This is the safe way to use heat, because tap-hot water simply cannot deliver the steep temperature gradient that fractures glass. Two conditions: take the bottle out of the fridge first so it is not cold going in, and never do this to anything sparkling, which is already under pressure.

Push a key in at about forty-five degrees, then twist and lift repeatedly, walking the cork up in stages. It is on every list because everybody has keys, and it is near the bottom because a key has no thread to grip with - you are relying on friction against a material engineered to be gripless. Expect cork crumbs in the glass and roughly a coin-flip outcome. Better than nothing at a picnic; strictly worse than a screw once you are anywhere near a toolbox.

Play a flame around the neck just above the cork until the trapped air expands and pushes it upward. Sometimes it works. It sits down here because glass conducts heat badly, so a flame heats one small patch fast while the glass right beside it stays cold - and that gradient is precisely what cracks bottles. Never on a fridge-cold bottle, never on anything sparkling, and stop instantly at any ticking or cracking sound.

The viral version: clamp a flat iron around the neck and let the heat push the cork out. Same thermal-shock physics as the lighter, with a worse profile - flat irons run to around 450F, they grip the glass on two opposing sides at once, and your hands are wrapped around the tool the entire time, so if the neck goes, the shards go where your fingers are. Food writers have flagged it as dangerous. No version of it beats a screw and a hammer.

Sparkling only, and the bottle does the work: internal pressure blows the top of the neck off along the glass seam once you strike the lip with the back of a heavy blade. Chill it hard, find the seam, remove foil and cage, strike outward along the seam in one committed stroke, pointed at nobody. Done right, the glass ring leaves with the cork and pressure blows fragments outward. Done tentatively, you get a cracked neck and glass in the wine.