A Cork with a Twist

As I've mentioned before, here and elsewhere, I do like wine bottles to have proper corks, made with cork oak. The plastic 'cork' or 'Stelvin' - a devil to extract, impossible to replace and smelling only of itself - is an abomination. The screw cap I can live with, and I can see why it now seems to be conquering the wine world; it's easy and it works, in its reductionist way. But now all that might be about to change, with the advent of the helical cork - a cork that twists out of the bottle and twists back in for an airtight seal. Why did nobody think of that before? You can read about the new style of cork in this typically exhaustive account on the BBC News website. We've all been there. You're on a picnic, you've got a bottle of wine - but no corkscrew. Enter the helical cork...