How to open a wine bottle if you don't have a corkscrew

If you drink wine and don't own a corkscrew, then the obvious solution to the 'cork conundrum' is to just buy one, already.

If you're caught without one and are desperate, however, the folks at lifehacker have tested a few crowdsourced techniques to pry open a bottle.

Have you tried any of these out before, or have any top suggestions? Let us know in the comments below:

Method One: Screw and pliers

It involves drilling the screw into the cork, before pulling it out with the pliers, as you'd expect.

It's not incredibly effective, but it just about works, provided the screw has wide grooves.

Method Two: Paper Clip

The theory is you open out a paper clip, force it in between the cork and the bottle edge, and then pull out the cork.

This one's pretty awful if we're honest. Nine times out of ten, you're just going to pull the paper clip out again.

Method Three: Sharp knife

Essentially, the idea behind this method is to carve a groove into the cork before pulling it out by said groove.

The lifehackers tried to, but only damaged the cork (and a little of the bottle) in the process.

More successful was pushing the cork down into the bottle, but then you have cork in your wine and possibly a splash zone to deal with.

In short: not a resounding success either.

Method Four: Shoe

Put the bottle in a shoe and smash it against a wall. Yes, really.

Apparently, because of pressure, the cork should be forced out.

The lifehackers had no success, but others report it to work. Maybe it requires a little more 'oomph'.

Seems like a fasttrack to a lot of broken bottles and ruined shoes, though.

Watch the full video, below: