"Have you ever been in this position: really nice bottle of wine, no corkscrew?" A representative of Mirabeau Wine, a winemaker in southern France, asks this question. Then he shows an ingenious solution to the problem.
I took a different approach. When my corkscrew shredded the cork instead of gripping it, I used my electric drill and largest bit (1/4 inch) to drive a hole through the cork. Of course, this left a lot of cork bits in the wine. So I filtered the wine through the basket of my coffeemaker, thus removing the cork.
The wine tasted terrible anyway.
Richard Gray of the Daily Telegraph describes Mirabeau's technique as a "disarmingly simple way of taking the cork out of a bottle without a corkscrew that will become your new party trick this year." I predict many broken bottles and a lot of spilled wine.