How can I open a bottle of wine with a wax seal?
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Dear Dr. Vinny,
I have been buying wines with wax covering the cork instead of a foil capsule. The wax seems to get harder and tougher with age, and I am having issues removing it to get to the cork. Sometimes it takes so much bottle manipulation that after access to the cork has been achieved, I need to re-cellar the bottle for sediment to settle again! Do you have any advice on opening these wines?
—Mark, Rockford, Ill.
Dear Mark,
My best advice is probably the least intuitive, but I promise it works most of the time. Don’t worry about removing the wax—just focus on removing the cork. Pretend the wax isn’t there.
I take my sharpest waiter’s corkscrew and put the tip of the worm into where the center of the cork should be. Then I proceed to open the bottle as I normally would. Usually by the time I’m done screwing the corkscrew into the cork, the wax is already starting to crack cleanly. I put the lever (hopefully a hinged one) of the corkscrew where the edge of the bottle lip will be. I move slowly, readjusting as needed. If you go too fast (or have a cheap double-armed corkscrew) you might break the cork. But in most cases, the wax will break off cleanly with the cork. It will take a wee bit more force (and some faith in me) to make this work. Of course, older wines might have more delicate corks, so be gentle with them.
If you end up breaking the cork in half, don’t sweat it. Just start again as you did before—screw the tip of the corkscrew into the center of the remaining cork and gently use the leverage of the hinged lever to pull the rest of the cork out. It happens to the best of us.
Most of the time, if you do this slowly and gently, there’s no need to worry about stirring up any sediment. If you seem to have a particularly thick glob of wax you need to get through, or if it’s not going very well, you can use the serrated blade of your waiter’s corkscrew to score the wax along the top of the bottle, as if you were taking off the top of a capsule. You don’t have to go all the way to the glass the entire way around the bottle, but that little bit of suggestion might help the wax break off where you want it to.
For the fussiest of wax, you can try carefully dipping the wax into hot water. After a minute or so, you should be able to remove it cleanly with a paper towel. Of course, that might disturb the sediment (and warm up the wine), so be careful! And don’t forget to check out our guide to decanting for help dealing with sediment.
—Dr. Vinny
