Weekend Sommelier: Wine devices – gimmicks or nice presents?

By Kevin Legg on September 19, 2026.

Expensive wine devices make poor presents. Most of them are smooth, fashionable gimmicks. Someone sees a corkscrew formed like a fish, a decanter within the form of driftwood or a sleeve that guarantees to sit back a bottle in three minutes, and thinks “now that’s for a lover of wine.”
Fast ahead 90 days, the fish is midway to the again of the drawer. The sculpture was discovered to be un-washable and not using a snake brush and the sleeve-o-matic has annexed freezer house it should maintain, unmoved, for 3 years.
Whatever was paid for these trinkets would have been higher spent on a bottle of precise wine. Oh, you possibly can nonetheless spend on devices – however the easy rule is that this: a great wine gadget appears to be like prefer it belongs in a busy kitchen, not a present store.
Turning to the corkscrew … the one you possibly can depend on is “The waiter’s friend” a folding lever with the worm and the two-step fulcrum. It is the workhorse selection of working sommeliers. It prices about fifteen {dollars} ($2 at thrift), lasts a lifetime, and opens a bottle in a number of seconds. Want to go fancy? Don’t fiddle and go for The Durand.
It grips an outdated cork from the edges whereas screwing down, and salvages delicate corks from very outdated premier bottles, popping out entire as an alternative of crumbling into the wine. German engineering, and reassuringly costly. The electrical rabbit, the novelty animal, the silver-plated factor with further gears … these fail the bottle take a look at.
Looking into the decanter. A easy plain glass one is completely good. I perceive {that a} clever wine aficionado makes use of a pyrex measuring jar. It lets tight wines breathe and provides you a take a look at the colour and a waft of the aroma to evaluate it.
The ornate hand-blown swirls and the heavy base, maintain the identical quantity of wine and do the identical job. But they sit on show as a result of no one can determine how you can wash them.
Fun truth – you should purchase decanter-washing beads which swirl across the base of the decanter it’s best to have by no means bought to wash out the dried residue of the ghosts of wines previous. More gimmick funds that ought to go into wine, I say.
Wine-chilling need to be the worst. The sleeves that go within the freezer after which wrap across the glass – promise velocity. They chill the skin and depart the center heat. A easy bucket with ice and water, and even only a does the job correctly. The bucket is the oldest trick within the e book for a cause.
And after all there’s the wine fridge. A devoted fridge feels just like the up-market civilized selection: local weather management, gentle management, humidity management. Most of them use a fuzzy logic meter, and so cycle on and off, so the temperature swings a number of levels each hour, and the humidity isn’t proper. A cool basement, or perhaps a closet on a north wall, holds a steadier temperature year-round and prices nothing to run.
The sample holds. The whim-wham with the artwork gallery aesthetic is the one which fails the bottle take a look at, whereas the plain device within the cutlery drawer wins.
“How dull it is … To rust unburnished, not to shine in use.”
Unless you’re positive, skip the gadget and purchase the bottle.
Kevin Legg is a wine fanatic out of Lethbridge with intensive coaching, journey and information surrounding the topic
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