Corkscrew Museum

In the Barolo Corkscrew Museum, you discover how to uncork a bottle of wine, it is a ritual that always has something magical: the eyes of those present are focused on who carries out the operation. The foil seal is removed and the tip of the corkscrew is placed in the center of the cork.

The screw sinks into the cork until it perforates and finally, with the necessary traction effort, the cork comes out of the neck of the bottle with a light snap. The cork is extracted and smelled to check if it has an odor. The nectar of the Gods is now ready to serve and taste. We are all used to using this object to uncork a bottle, it is a usual and automatic gesture that allows us to access one of the pleasures of life.

Let's start with two certainties: the corkscrew was created to extract a cork from a glass container, even if not necessarily from a bottle containing wine; the first patent of a corkscrew dates back to 1795, and is from the Englishman Samuel Henshall. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the glass bottle container was a rare, expensive, fragile object with a capacity that was not always the same.

In Italy until 1728 the trade of wine in glass containers was forbidden and one of the main reasons was the need to oppose fraud since the then artisanal production did not allow the production of identical bottles with the same capacity.

In fact, it was the royal decree of 25 May 1728 that authorized its sale and this is linked to the appearance of more solid bottles, from England, of the so-called "black glass" type which guaranteed a homogeneous capacity.