Here’s how one of the best restaurants in the world, Eleven Madison Park, opens a bottle of wine when the wine is especially old and the cork is possibly all crumbly: they use burning hot metal tongs to heat up bottle so it can be ‘magically’ opened from the neck, avoiding the cork.
Business Insider made the video below where Jonathan Ross, a sommelier at Eleven Madison Park, shows (and explains!) how (and why) it’s done this way.