So we're about to open up a 20-year old
bottle of wine, the 1997 Jordan Cabernet and I want to show you guys how to use
what's called an Ah-So. A different wine tool for using, when you have an older
cork like this, people might struggle with using a regular corkscrew. We
recommend when a wine is ten years old or older to use an Ah-So just because
the cork as it ages, along with the wine, the integrity will start to crumble. And
so the Ah-So is a little gentler on the cork and you're not going to have any
issues with crumbling and you'll be able to extract the cork and not damage it,
which would be the case if you were to use a cork screw on anything we find older
than 10-years.
So this being 20 we're definitely going to use an Ah-So. So we'll
show how to use that right now. So you're going to need one other tool which is a
foil cutter, as an Ah-So doesn't have a foil cutter on it. Alright so we're
gonna go ahead and open up this bottle with the Ah-So. It might be easier to stand
up just to shimmy the Ah-So into the bottle. It also has two prongs – one that's
longer than the other. You're going to want to insert the longer prong first,
followed by the shorter prong. And then you're just going to kind of wiggle it back
and forth until it slowly kind of gets further and further into the neck of the
bottle.
This is kind of where you want to be careful because this is a point where
you could push the cork into the bottle, so just take your time and kind of
shimmy it in. And now John is twisting and pulling up, slowly and carefully. Perfect. There you go, but you can see on the cork site here there is a little bit of
crumbling. So this was a perfect one to use and Ah-So on. If you were to use a
traditional cork screw on a wine of this age, you would insert the cork screw and
most likely the cork is going to fall apart and crumble. It can break in half or just
kind of really decimate. And that doesn't really mean it's a bad cork by
any means, the cork is a natural product and we know that it could have
its integrity for up to 15-years, but beyond that it will start to to crumble.
So we definitely recommend using an Ah-So for 10-years or older, just to be on the safe
side.