It's good when a plan comes together...

[jdaw1]

Recessed cork.

[jdaw1]

[djewesbury]

A very good set of photos.

[jdaw1]

Edit, 5pm Tue 20 Jan 2015: Daniel has kindly edited the videos to shrink them. This post now points to the new smaller videos.

The recessed cork (10Mb): jdawiseman.com/2015/20150119_recessed_cork.mp4;
Cork extraction (27Mb): jdawiseman.com/2015/20150119_extracted.mp4.

[AHB]

Angels have been busy! Thanks goodness for their willingness to report back accurately

But seriously - is such bottle variation desirable?

p.s. after acquiring 3 magnums of Fonseca 2009 this week I now feel that I was overly penurious by not buying all 6.

That is a remarkably good find where you are.

[PhilW]

Phil, thanks for the interesting report. What's the diameter of the cork?

I didn't have a measure, but I would estimate approx. 32mm top diameter, 24mm bottom.

And what corkscrew did you use?

I used the centre part of a Durand, but not the hand/prongs; this meant I could use the sides to apply constant gentle upward pressure (see the video Julian posted a link to). It too quite a lot of pressure, but as soon as it released it fully released (i.e. having moved it up 2-3mm it was then fully loose and could move side to side).

I forgot to mention about the magnum corks; these were a more normal shape, but were only just big enough and quite soggy. For the cork in Magnum #1 neither I nor Julian could get the end of a corkscrew in without the cork sliding down the neck into the bottle at the slightest touch; despite our best efforts it fell in. For the next few we used a screwpull, though the corks were quite fragile and wanted to tear, in particular the very bottom (last ~10%) of the soggy corks would to fall off at the slightest provocation; once we had a cork extracted whole (tricky, but achieved on third attempt) we switched to using the Durand which quickly and easily extract the rest (all whole, though scuffed down the side of each cork as occurs when using the Durand).

[jdaw1]

Two posts moved by jdaw1 to The Durand corkscrew.