Do you have a lot of parties where you are always opening up wine bottles or a lot of champagne? The usual way of doing this is by using the normal hand operated cork screw, but they now make a cordless or battery operated automatic wine opener, made by Emerson. These come in very handy especially if you have a lot of dinner parties throughout the year. This will save you from spilling any red wine on your carpeting or clothing. We found ours an Ace Hardware store but I have also seen these on sale at Walgreens for the low price of 9.99.
Description
This little neat appliance stands only 11” tall and has an opening of 1-¼” in diameter (at the end where you insert the bottle neck), the total diameter of the end where you stick this over the wine bottle is 2.5” in diameter, and the other end has a cap on it and that is where the batteries are stored. This is black in color and the ends have a brushed silver look to it. Emerson has made this very lightweight, it only weighs 12.4 ounces. The opening that holds the batteries is only 1-7/8” in diameter and it has a plastic battery housing, this unit that you will have to remove to install the batteries, will hold 4 AA batteries all together. These batteries do not come included with this product. You will need to purchase a good set of batteries because this will need to use a lot of power to open a bottle of wine. This product comes with a total of three parts and these include and seal (foil) cutter, the unit itself and the plastic battery pack that is located inside. Inside of the open end you should see a corkscrew object that will rotate while you are pressing the up and down button.
Experiences
You may have to experiment by using this to get the knack of it working right for you. That is what we did, because this product was not working right when we first started to use this. When we first set this on top of our first wine bottle it kind of wobbled and we had to hold it straight on top of the bottle and let the very sharp corkscrew puncture the cork. The foil seal should have been removed by this time. You will only need to apply a slight amount of pressure and the automatic opener will do the rest. Once you have punctured the cork you will press the down part of the button and you will hear a motor running and what this is doing is slowly turning the corkscrew into the cork.
This Emerson wine opener should pull the cork all the way out of the bottle, and then you are suppose to push the button so that the screw will turn in the opposite direction and the cork will come off. Well, this is easier said than done. We tried this on a fresh cold bottle of wine out of the fridge and when we put this on top of the bottle, it seemed to sound like the batteries were old and seemed to die out on us. It did not remove the cork and we had to manually remove the cork.
So, that is when I tried this on a room temperature bottle of wine. This is when the wine opener worked properly, with the exception of getting the cork off of the corkscrew. What we did was push the wine opener back on the bottle and reinsert the cork ever so slightly into the bottle and let the bottle act as a vise and push the reverse button and the cork came off with ease. This opener was one step away from being thrown out, but it has been given a reprieve. I did notice that there is a definite difference between opening a cold bottle and a room temperature bottle of wine.
Warranty
As far as I know this has not warranty. I called the company and they said that if this does not work properly then take it back to the place of purchase. The customer service staff were no very helpful, but with experiment this you may be able to get this to work as I did.
Conclusion
This is a very unique product and may or may not work for you. After experimenting with it I have gotten it to work properly and we just love it. But it took about four bottles of wine to find out how to use this so it will benefit us. 3.5 stars for this and I am still questioning the value of this product to me.