This piece originally appeared in SAVEUR’s Fall/Winter 2025 issue. See more stories from Issue 205.

When I went to the shop, I would choose such things as tins of tea, little jars of jam made from rare fruits, special spices in tiny silver canisters, fine chocolates that I had never seen outside of France, and elegant bottles of Sicilian olive oil. I always felt happy after I had chosen a treat for someone from there. But then I started popping in more regularly to pick up things for myself, too: risotto rice, Japanese soy sauce flavored with shiitake mushrooms, excellent mustard, exquisite blood oranges, and the best goat cheese I ever tasted.

Sometimes, when I knew that my son would be away for dinner at his dad’s house, I would buy myself a single luscious thing to make me feel less lonely at the table: a few slices of cured meat, an unusual shape of pasta, or some smoked cod’s roe for making taramasalata. Cheaper than therapy, I told myself (although I was also having therapy and it helped). I was mesmerized by the abundance and variety of the products for sale on the neatly arranged shelves. It was like being inside a carefully curated museum where you could actually buy and eat the exhibits.

Once, when I was in the shop, Zoltan mentioned casually that he collected corkscrews. I asked if we could have coffee and talk more about it. We met at a Greek café down the road where he told me about the “fixation” he had with vintage corkscrews, most of them from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Back in his apartment in Hungary, he said he had whole boxes of corkscrews.

Why would someone choose to devote time and money to collecting corkscrews (or nutmeg graters or ice cream scoops or jelly molds, as the case may be)? An “obsession organized” is how writer Nikolai Aristides once defined the act of collecting. Zoltan told me straight out that he was “pretty self-aware” about the fact that his interest in corkscrews had become a fixation.

No one needs dozens and dozens of vintage corkscrews, least of all someone like Zoltan who recently purchased a pricey new gadget called the Coravin Wine Preservation System. This miraculous gizmo can siphon off a glass of wine at a time using argon gas, leaving the rest of the bottle as fresh as before. When he has an excellent bottle of wine, Zoltan appreciates being able to drink it a few glasses at a time without wasting a drop. The downside, as he concedes, is that owning the Coravin makes his whole collection of corkscrews obsolete. And yet, when he finds himself at a flea market that sells old corkscrews, he generally can’t resist buying just a few more.

It has been estimated that one in three Americans has a collection of some kind, making it a far more mainstream pursuit than you might guess from the cruel laughter with which collectors are sometimes greeted. The question is why some of us become collectors while others don’t. In describing the origins of their collection, a collector will often attribute it to some kind of fortunate accident. Perhaps it started when a parent gave them a fossil as a birthday present or a kindly relative brought them back a beautiful teapot from China and the interest escalated from there. But this only gets to “the edge of the question,” as scholar of collecting Susan Pearce observes, because most of us are given random gifts, but we don’t all end up collecting them. “We are left wondering,” Pearce writes, whether an essential feature of the collector is a ­predisposition to collect.

Zoltan certainly recognizes collector-​­like traits in himself. Corkscrews are far from being his only obsession. “Fruit is another of my interests,” he told me one time when I came into the shop and he offered me a taste of a wild strawberry from a punnet he had stashed for personal use under the counter. He says that his beautiful food shop partly came about as a way to manage his own “hoarding” tendencies. After training as an electrical engineer in Hungary, he worked in the newspaper industry for a while and then ran his own graphic design business. The food shop in Budapest was the first line of work in which he could fully channel his obsessive desire to collect. “Grocery helped me a lot,” he says. In his new shop in England, he is able to amass and arrange beautiful things, but the food must be disposed of before it goes off, thus forcing him to stop hoarding it at a certain point. “I remind my staff we actually have to sell this stuff!” he tells me.

As to why Zoltan got hooked on ­corkscrews as opposed to anything else, he has a few different answers. One reason is that, as a young man, he took a trip to Portugal to see how corks were produced. Standing in the ancient cork forests, he was struck by what a “magical product” cork is. His obsession with corkscrews, as opposed to corks, is a little more mysterious. Corkscrews were not something he grew up with. In the old ​­Soviet-​­era Hungary, his grandfather used to make his own “terrible-​­tasting” wine. It was stored in large demijohns like ​­home-​­brewed beer, so there was no reason for anyone to use a corkscrew. “Nobody had bottles then,” Zoltan says. The first time he handled a corkscrew was during his student days in Budapest, when he worked as a bartender while studying science at university. “We all drank red wine mixed with Coke,” he recalls. This ​­wine-​­and-​­Coke combo was a continuation of the old Hungarian custom of mixing wine with ­sparkling water. (Fizzy water is called “wine water” in Hungary.) Working behind the bar, Zoltan had to open bottle after bottle of ropey red wine and he noticed that the corkscrew the bar supplied really hurt his hand because it was so badly made.

Until 1989, Hungary was under Communist rule, which affected corkscrew design, along with almost everything else about everyday life. The corkscrews at the bar where Zoltan worked were made from cheap plated metal and “mass-​­produced to a standard that was deemed sufficient.” So as far as Zoltan was concerned, these Communist bottle openers were “nasty” to use and felt flimsy, but in this, as in other matters, “the consumer didn’t have a say.”

The first time Zoltan found a ­corkscrew he really liked was sometime around ​­1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when it became possible to trade freely again. Suddenly, the flea markets of Budapest started to sell lots of old items from the ​­pre-​­Communist era. Many restaurants were sold off, and people found storage rooms from the 1940s that were just as they had been back ​­then—​like a time capsule, according to Zoltan. Perusing the flea markets, he bought a corkscrew from the 1920s. It was a compact lever design known in Hungary as a “lemonade” because the lever at the end is used to open bottles of lemonade or beer. In much of the world, the folding lever design is called the waiter’s friend; this is the one an ​­early-​­20th-​­century waiter kept in his apron as he bustled from table to table opening bottles. The basic formula was established in 1883 by a German called Carl Wienke, who figured out that a folding corkscrew could combine with a ​­knife-​­like handle plus a grippy lever to attach to the bottle’s rim and take much of the grunt work out of pulling the cork. In later designs, the lever doubled up as a cap lifter, and sometimes a small folding knife was added for cutting the foil from the wine bottle to reveal the cork. The first corkscrew Zoltan found at the flea market was one of these.

Not all corkscrews are made alike. Technically, the Communist corkscrews that Zoltan had used up to now were very similar in design to this lemonade corkscrew from the 1920s. But the two tools felt entirely different in his hands. The 1920s corkscrew was ​­heavier—it was made of pleasingly solid steel, not plated ​­metal—and he was gratified to find that it didn’t hurt to use it. Plus, it did a much better job of opening bottles. When he took it back to the bar, “Everyone was like ‘Oh my god, it’s so efficient! So fast!’” It was a thrill to realize that the older corkscrew was actually more effective than the modern one. The next stage of Zoltan’s corkscrew obsession was when he fell in love with good wine (not the ​­wine-​­and-​­Coke kind) on a trip to France with a French girlfriend. He found himself buying half a dozen vintage corkscrews. The collection was now becoming serious.

Before my conversation with Zoltan, I had never paid much attention to corkscrews, old or otherwise, but he made me see how easily they could become an object of desire. The question of how to extract a firmly lodged cork from a bottle without damaging either the cork or your hand is far from obvious. A perfect corkscrew has a combination of brute force and delicacy, and there are whole subcultures of corkscrew collectors who know the difference between a good corkscrew and a great one. In 1974, two corkscrew connoisseurs, Bernard Watney and Timothy Diener, founded The International Correspondence of Corkscrew Addicts, a society with 50 members, all crazy about old corkscrews.

I say “old,” but in truth there is no such thing as a very old corkscrew. Wine is ancient, but the corkscrew is not. The first patent for a corkscrew (with a button added to the shank) was issued to one Samuel Henshall of Edinburgh as late as 1795. Bottle screws, as they were first known, had been around for longer than this, but not much. There is a very simple explanation: For most of its history, wine was stored not in ​­cork-​­stopped bottles but in large clay jars, from which it was transferred to smaller pitchers for consumption. In the ancient world, wine jars were often only loosely sealed because the wine was consumed fresh, almost as soon as it was made. The ancient terracotta amphora or wine jar, as used in Greece, Rome, and Egypt, was stoppered with various bungs made from such things as cork, clay, wood, wadded leaves, or cloth and sealed over with something like beeswax or resin. How these bungs were extracted from wine jars is not known, although archaeologists in Egypt have found some ingenious “pop-​­top” clay seals with strings at the sides for lifting out—the screw cap openings of their day.

Technologies are not born one at a time but in clusters. ​­Cork-​­topped glass bottles only became standardized in size and shape in the 18th century, meaning that for the first time, wine could be aged in the bottle. But this gave rise to a new problem: how to extract the cork and get to the precious liquid inside. Hands, nails, skewers, and teeth would all have been used in the days before the corkscrew was a common device. We have no idea who invented the first twisting metal screw for pulling ​­corks—the technical term for the screw part of a corkscrew is the “worm.” What we do know is that something very similar had been used for extracting bullets from guns since the 1630s, so it is possible that the corkscrew has military origins.

Every corkscrew has roughly the same anatomy: a worm, a shank, and a handle. But from this basic pattern, they have been beautified and improved in countless ways, which is part of what makes them so collectible. The worm itself may take one of three different forms: the classic helical worm, which looks like DNA; the center worm, with a steel core around which a ridge spirals; and the Archimedes worm, in which the screw looks like wool spiraled around a knitting needle. As for the handle, it could be anything from basic to ornate: from wood to silver, from bone to horn, from patterned to plain. ​­Nineteenth-​­century corkscrew handles might be decorated with advertising messages like a mini billboard or encrusted with precious metals and ornamentation like a Fabergé egg. In Germany in the 1890s, there was a whole series of ​­corkscrews—​more or less ​­obscene—​made to mimic human anatomy. In some of the most popular designs, the worm emerged from a pair of jauntily folding legs or out of the breasts of a mermaid.

I have not even begun to discuss all the ways in which the basic mechanism of the corkscrew was elaborated over the years: the various shafts and levers and racks and concertinas, each of which claimed to make the job of opening a bottle easier (although some of them were little improvements on the basic ​­twist-​­and-​­pull model). Zoltan told me that he was a fan of the classic French winged corkscrew, with two large levers attached to oversized gears. This design is sometimes called the “de Gaulle,” because when the wings are up, it calls to mind the French politician Charles de Gaulle, who gesticulated with his arms in the air when giving speeches. The de Gaulle has a satisfying and reliable mechanism that takes most of the jeopardy out of opening a bottle of wine, although some of us still find it tricky to use.

It is not clear what the future is for ​­corkscrews—​or indeed for ​­corks—​in an era of climate change. On the one hand, cork is a renewable and biodegradable product. Moreover, the cork trees of Portugal are a carbon sink: they actually capture CO2 from the atmosphere, thus offsetting the carbon emissions involved in producing a bottle of wine. On the other hand, cork trees are at risk from drought and wildfire as average summer temperatures rise in the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, many wineries have switched to screw caps, not least because they are so much cheaper to produce than corks.

And yet the corkscrew endures. When I first asked Zoltan why corkscrews mean so much to him, the first answer he gave me was a sensory one. Nothing, he said, could replace the ­delicate ­popping ​­sound—​quieter but no less exciting than a champagne cork ​­bursting—​that happens when the worm has managed to free the cork from the bottle, enabling you to smell its contents at last. It is a sound associated for most wine drinkers with the anticipation of happy times with friends.

Enjoying the popping sound of a wine bottle is a fine reason to own one corkscrew. But why amass a whole collection of them? When I asked Zoltan this question for a second time a couple of weeks later, his answer went deeper. It was about a “connection” with previous generations, he said. British people like me had no idea how lucky we were to have lived through so many years with “no invasion, no camps, no wars.” In the Eastern Europe of his youth, by contrast, “the change has been relentless.” His own family was testimony to the number of times borders had changed in the region after the fall of the ​­Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, after the end of the First World War. “I could have five passports,” Zoltan told me. His ​­great-​­grandfather was a prisoner of war until 1917 in what is ​­modern-​­day Ukraine. Zoltan still owns a metal teapot that belonged to him and sleeps with it near his bed. This teapot, he says, is actually more precious to him than any of the corkscrews.

Among other things, Zoltan’s ­corkscrew collection was a way to bypass the Communist Hungary he grew up in and return to an earlier and freer Europe in which there were waiters opening bottles of wine and ­lemonade in lovely cafés. He had long been haunted, he told me, by the thought that we can never know what the food of the past really tasted like. “We didn’t taste it. We can’t smell it.” By contrast, a tool such as a corkscrew can offer ­continuity with the human beings who handled it before us because it is still the same piece of metal.

Zoltan loves to imagine an archetypal waiter in Paris during the Belle Époque using a corkscrew just like the ones in his collection. “He was opening the same bottles. I have a connection with that. Everything else is perishable.”

Reprinted from The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects by Bee Wilson. Copyright © 2025 by Bee Wilson. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.