Autumn is when the calendar quietly fills up again. The evenings draw in, the diary picks up — a supper with friends, a birthday, the long slide towards the festive season — and somewhere in most of those evenings there is a bottle of wine and the small, faintly stressful question of how to get into it. For most of the year a corkscrew is a drawer afterthought. From about October onward it becomes the tool you actually reach for, in front of people, quietly hoping it behaves.
This is the case for a lever corkscrew, and it is worth explaining what one is before you buy, because the word "corkscrew" covers several quite different tools.
What a lever corkscrew actually is
A lever corkscrew does the pulling for you. You clamp it over the neck of the bottle, work the lever handle down to drive the spiral into the cork, then lift the lever back up and it draws the cork straight out. That is the whole action: down, then up. Compare it with the folding waiter's friend, where you twist the spiral in by hand and then heave the cork out against the lip of the bottle, and the appeal is plain. The lever turns a two-handed tug into a motion you can manage while you carry on talking.
We no longer stock a lever corkscrew. We did until recently, and this piece was written about the one we sold; it is left up because it is a fair account of what this kind of tool is, but there is nothing here to buy. A lever corkscrew of this type is a wine bottle opener and nothing more elaborate than that — there is no setting to learn, and it is completely manual: no batteries, no plug, nothing to charge. You clamp, you work the handle, you pour.
What was in the box
This is where a lot of listings get slippery, so we were plain about it while we sold it: what arrived was the opener on its own. There was no foil cutter for the sleeve at the top of the bottle, no stopper for the leftovers, no spare spiral and no gift box — the tool itself, not a boxed set. It measured 18 × 14.5 × 3 cm, so it tucked into a kitchen drawer or stood beside the bottles without taking over the worktop, and it shipped at roughly 320 g. That detail is worth checking on any lever corkscrew before you buy one, wherever you buy it.
Why it earns its place this season
The reason a tool like this matters more from autumn onward is simply volume and audience. In July you open the odd bottle for yourself; across the darker months you open them for other people, often several in one evening, sometimes while you are also trying to serve food and keep a conversation going. A corkscrew that needs both hands and a braced knee is fine in private and a nuisance in company. One that opens a bottle with a single down-and-up of a lever lets you stay a host rather than becoming, briefly, a person wrestling with the furniture.
It is also the least glamorous but most useful kind of small upgrade — the sort of thing you never think to replace until you borrow a good one, and then never go back to the old way. It is worth sorting out before the season proper begins, rather than rediscovering mid-gathering that the only opener in the house is the bent one that came home from a holiday flat. We made much the same case about our week-three smoothie habit — the small worktop tools that quietly get used are the ones worth having.
Where to get one now
Not from us. We are not stocking a lever corkscrew at the moment, so there is no price, delivery window or return window for one on this site, and nothing on this page is an offer to sell you one. Any good kitchen or general retailer carries the lever type described above. If you came here looking for something we do sell, our current range is here.