Corkscrew

From 1983-1987, I worked at Chuck's Steak House, a restaurant that was quite popular at the time but does not exist today (not in Sacramento, at least - the original is in Honolulu, and we went there on our Hawaii trip in 2006). For the first year, I was a bus boy, and after that a waiter. I was in graduate school at the time - never finished my Masters Degree (finished the coursework, but not the thesis), but met my wife in one of my classes, so it wasn't a total loss.

I may have learned just as much as a waiter - how to deal with unreasonable people; how to form a team with a group of people that have little in common except for the fact that they work at the same place - as I did in graduate school. Waiting tables is a hard job, and to this day I appreciate good service at a restaurant as much as I do the food.

Every now and then, our manager would set up a "wine seminar" for the wait crew. Our wine merchant would come into the restaurant in the afternoon, ask each of us to open a bottle and present it as if we were presenting it to a customer. He'd tell us about each wine, and then critique our technique - and even if we hadn't done a great job; well, heck - there were 6-7 open bottles of wine that needed to be consumed before the work night began.

The corkscrew in the picture above is the one I was given at the last wine seminar I attended, which was probably in May or June of 1987. Once you get a great corkscrew, you should never let it go. This one has served me well for almost 25 years, and I expect it to be around for at least another 25. That is, if they are still making wine with corks by that time.