Automatic Wine Opener

I have friends who won’t serve wine with dinner or in front of company because they are afraid of opening the wine bottle!

Now taking the cork out of a bottle of wine is not that hard, except sometimes with much older bottles of wine where the cork may easily break or crumble. But if you rarely do it, it can be a challenge. Also, more and more wines are also coming with screwcaps these days, and many of them are even fairly expensive bottles unlike in the old days when screw cap wines were all cheap plonk.

Still, most wines have corks and an automatic wine opener can be a super handy gadget for many folks. By Automatic Wine Opener, I mean no human supplied pressure or even thinking involved. This leaves out lever type openers like The Rabbit and The Houdini, which incidentally require a bit of thought if you’ve never seen or used one before.

The two types of legitimate automatic wine openers are electric powered units and gas powered units. Electric automatic wine openers are the most popular so we'll cover them first.

The Oster 4207 Electric Wine-Bottle Opener is probably the most popular by far electric automatic wine opener.

It's cordless and opens up to 30 bottles on a single charge with an easy pushbutton operation. It comes with a foil cutter for removing seals (you'd better remove any seal first or it simply won't work - no surprise!). When not in use it sits on its convenient and included charging base.

The Peugeot Elis Electric Corkscrew is another option. It's a great gift as it's fancier (and a bit more expensive too). I haven't used it but some people rave about it!

Gas powered automatic wine openers are pretty cool. They typically take a disposable gas cartridge and can open many dozens of bottles from one cartridge. They have a needle you insert through the cork, you turn on the gas often by pressing a button, and the cork pops out.

I first ran into one of these in California at my friend Jeff's house. He swears by his, and it's fun to use too!

A very popular example is the Cork Pops Wine Bottle Opener. It's about $20, a single charge opens 60 or so bottles, it doesn't effect the taste of the wine, and most people love it. A couple people have mentioned that the needle is a little tough to pierce some corks with and sometimes hard to get off, but that's a minor complaint. People are so fond of this automatic wine opener that they even take it to restaurants!