Review: Cork Pops Legacy Wine Opener
Screwing a piece of metal into a cork and physically yanking it out from the neck of the bottle? How barbaric. One of the more novel ways to get a cork out of a bottle of wine is to use compressed air. The Cork Pops Legacy works like most of these devices: You jab a thin needle straight down through the cork, press a button on top and pull and, presto, an injection of inert propellant forces the cork to (literally) pop out the top.
It takes some practice, but once you master it, it really does emerge as a very fast way to remove a cork. When it works, that is. In my testing, sometimes the cork didn’t quite make it all the way out, sometimes it didn’t really budge at all. It’s a problem when this happens, as once the gas is injected it creates a high-pressure zone in the bottle’s head space. Trying to remove the needle so you can use a standard corkscrew as plan B then creates a kind of vacuum, which makes it tough to get the needle out — destroying any of the Cork Pops’ time-saving advantages. Fortunately, these kinds of incidents are few and far between.
The Cork Pops Legacy includes a built-in foil cutter at its base and comes in three finishes. I’d recommend the black; the copper version I sampled is a bit tacky and garish. For $24, however, the product makes a solid gift for that wine-loving friend in your life, while also working well as an option to have on hand when you need to open a number of bottles at once. That said, for daily use, I’m sticking with a Rabbit.
B+ / $24 / [BUY IT NOW FROM AMAZON]
Cork Pops Legacy Wine Opener
$24
