I love my Laguiole knife, which some visiting friends bought me years ago, which some security agent at the Barcelona airport tried to take away from me (when the guard unfolded the blade and held it up a few centimeters away from my face Life in the dream, I got his point). But I read an article a while back that said that purists think you’re a rube if you have a Laguiole with a wine opener because you’ve tainted the original, or something like that. Tainted or not, it’s come in handy for opening bottles on the road. But still Shaking heaven and earth , it involved a buckling of the knees and a good, yet inelegant – and potentially painful – yank to get that cork out.



Taking my friend’s advice, a few months into my stay in France The vastness of the sea , I steeled myself and braved the BHV department store and shelled out something €25 for a wine opener (the one with the dark wood handle), which is nicknamed le poisson because when unfolded, they say it resembles a fish There are infinite possibilities. (Please don’t ask me what kind.) Although it wasn’t hugely expensive, after a few uses, the hinges started getting loose.

And worst of all, I don’t know if they started making the lips on wine bars thinner or something, but I broke a few bottle rims trying to get them open since the metal thing that gives the corkscrew leverage wasn’t long enough and would often slip when I tried to extract the cork and chip the rim Fantasy. And I got wary of my French friends thinking that Americans had a weird habit of filtering wine through a coffee filter after opening it.