What's in a corkscrew? - Telegraph By the end of dinner we'd had to shuffle places so I could learn more about corkscrews (Gerovassiliou said he'd spent more than €1 million on his) and the next morning I found myself on a tour of some 3,000 on display at his winery in Epanomi. The exhibition begins with some gorgeous old amphorae, dating back to the sixth century BC. The wine-carrying terracotta vessels were usually stoppered with bunched cloth or leather and sealed with mud. "Cork was known by the Romans, but it was forgotten," said my guide, Dimitrius Toussis, a cancer doctor and corkscrew connoisseur (Gerovassiliou was busy blending wine up in another winery further east). It's not certain when corks were first used in the modern age, but the earliest were tapered so they could be removed by hand ("or teeth," says Dr Toussis). Corks and corkscrews were in common use by the 17th century, though the practice began not with wine merchants but apothecaries. The first corkscrew was a small, slender helix with a ring at the top to lock your finger through and pull, which could be used to unstopper a lady's perfume bottle. As corks developed, so too did corkscrews, becoming bigger and sturdier to deal with longer, more awkward corks. The world's first patent for a corkscrew was achieved in 1795. "It was very similar to one made by Thomas Read in 1790," says Dr. Toussis, "but an Englishman called Samuel Henshall stole the idea." This corkscrew incorporated a disc that prevented the worm from going too deep into the cork and forced the cork to turn in the neck of the bottle, breaking the seal to make it easier to pull and saving 18th-century gentlemen the indignity of putting the bottle between their knees and wrenching. "Ten years ago," Gerovassiliou had told me wistfully, "we'd go to flea markets - Caledonian Road in north London, Portobello - as soon as they opened at 6am, with a torch, so we could see very quickly and be the first to find something. Now, it's rare I can find a piece I don't have. Looking around the spree of variations, upgrades and embellishments catalogued here, I can see why. I was particularly taken with the display of 19th-century corkscrews set into the top of walking sticks, so you could go for a stroll and open a bottle of claret. There are corkscrews with brushes so you can sweep dust from the top of the bottle; leg-openers where the double-lever model allows the cork to be pulled between a brightly stockinged pair of legs; a corkscrew in a coffin to mark Prohibition; champagne openers with a long tube extending deep into the bottle and a little tap on the end - dispensers so you don't actually have to pour; a Copley type, named after John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) the American artist who, when his host couldn't find anything with which to open a bottle of wine, painted a still life of a corkscrew on the library wall, pointing out that he would never again be without one. My tour ends. I am shown the newsletter of the ICCA (International Correspondence of Corkscrew Addicts) which apparently has about 250 members, "but not all of them important," adds Dr. Toussis. But - call me a barbarian - for me, a corkscrew is something to get the cork out of a bottle of wine as quickly as possible: no more and no less. I think I'll stick with my double-lever Waiter's Friend.