I think most of us know of the Durand and use it for opening older bottles. But many people may not know that a number of years ago Durand did a special run of a “port version”, where the worm and the tines are a quarter of an inch longer. This is for those longer corks of old port bottles. I didn’t buy one back then, which was a bad decision.
Fast forward to a week ago, I contacted Durand to see if they had any left. It turns out that they make a special run of them occasionally, and they did some recently. I placed an order and got mine today. Below are some comparison photos. Looks like I have a reason to open some port!
Interesting. The corkscrew of the normal Durand is already longer than that of most corkscrews, so I never had an issue with opening wines with longer corks. Don’t think I’ve ever encountered a time where I didn’t drive the Durand worm completely through a cork.
I’ve used my regular Durand for the 2 - 4 bottles of Vintage Prot I open per year with mostly good results, but it’s really interesting and good to know this exists.
I know the folks who make and distribute the Durand. The port edition was made specifically to solve a problem brought up by Roy Hersh. He felt that the extra length of the worm was needed for some older port bottles. I wished they had named it the “Roy Hersh” model. These were made in a limited run a few years ago but it looks like they might be still manufacturing it on a limited basis.
If I had no Durands and wanted to buy one, and I did a fair amount of opening of older Port, I would definitely buy this one instead of the regular one. I’ve had issues occasionally opening really old port with the regular Durand mostly because of the length of the tines of the Ah-So piece.
I initially reached out to them through the “Contact Us” on the Durand website. I suggest doing that so that it gets handled by anyone available instead of reaching out directly to the person that helped me. They were very quick to respond, the next day.
This software is a hoot. I’ve been meaning to ask if others are having this problem, but it was so random I didn’t bother: sometimes when I hit the “reply” button, it doesn’t show as a reply to the post. So I tried it again with the “test reply” text and it shows as a reply to John’s post. So I deleted the text
Thanks, John!
in the previous one and edited this post with it. But I can’t do that because the AI system won’t allow me to be redundant, like it is any of their business.
“An error occurred: Body is too similar to what you recently posted”
