When you ask Wayne Meadows about how many corkscrews he has in his collection he says he doesn't have an exact number and it doesn't matter.
"I tell everyone the same thing: 3,000 plus or minus 1,000," he says. "If you said who has the rarest ones I probably have a lot of rare ones."
For Meadows, it's not the amount, though surely he has one of the largest collections. It's about the quality; he figures his collection is valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"The trick is endless people invented endless corkscrews," he says, explaining the huge variety.
That's why he has rarity upon rarity, including the world's only steam-powered corkscrew, cork picks (which predate corkscrews) and plenty of corkscrews which are the last or one of the last of their kind. His collection of bar corkscrews is the largest in the world.
"I have a lot of one-of-a-kind corkscrews," adds Meadows.
The collection spans styles and centuries. The oldest are from the 17th century; they're a style called "cages" and come from France. Others are made out of rare or odd material, like a boar's tusk. Then there is the art deco styling of Karl Hagenauer, the "greatest designer" of corkscrews, according to Meadows.
"I have the most Hagenauer corkscrews in the world," he says.
The collection was started in the mid-70s when Meadows was the vice-president of marketing for a satellite company.
"I went to visit a friend and he had a bunch of corkscrews and I had never seen anything like it," Meadows says of how it all began. It helped that he was a winemaker himself (and still is).
Through his job he got to travel and would line up trips with flea markets he could peruse for new pieces, coming home with bags full -- sometimes a trip would net him 40 new pieces. In hindsight, what he was buying was mostly junk, he says.
"It just plum grew," he says of his earlier collecting days.
Over the decades his collection grew and became more refined. Meadows doesn't collect run-of-the-mill hotel pieces or the one you get free with a bottle of Yellowtail or something. Bar corkscrews were added, along with rarities and historic models. In fact, he literally wrote the book about bar corkscrews; published in 2001 the Compendium of Bar Corkscrews is an essential work for the niche collectible.
"They're back from when beer was corked," Meadows says about bar corkscrews. "You need to mount it on the bar so you could open 100 bottles of beers."
Bottle caps are a more recent invention; the crown cap covering your bottle of Budweiser or Strange Fellows wasn't patented until 1892.
In 2003, as he was retiring, he decided to take on a new project, which ended up twinning with his massive collection (and related items).
"When I retired I went to walk up to get bread from Terra; I saw a house three doors away that was a wreck," he says.
He decided to buy the house and turn it into a bed-and-breakfast.
"I told my wife I was going to do that and she told me 'don't tell me your problems,'" he remembers.
His wife, Sal, did help, of course. Notably, the Corkscrew Inn, as it came to be known, was decorated by her, including plenty of stained glass. To be fair, she's also involved in the collection; she wrote Austrian Figural Corkscrew Design with Meadows in 2015.
He also took the time to build his own, making him a corkscrew inventor as well as collector. Notably, he built a steam-powered corkscrew (video below) and Meccano corkscrew (video way below). Both are world firsts (and only).
For the past 17 years the Inn provided accommodation and a place to show off some of Meadows highlight pieces. However, the hotel closed in 2020 due to the pandemic, and Meadows moved what was there back to his home.
His collection is one of a few in Canada; locally one of his friends is also a major collector locally, and there's someone in Calgary. Ontario has a few more helixophiles (the word for corkscrew fans). Conventions are held by the Canadian Corkscrew Collectors Club each year (well, not the last two) in places like Cologne, Germany and Bucharest, Romania (home to the largest collection of corkscrews).
However, Meadows thinks the very idea of large, physical collections is beginning to wan. He notes that most young people don't have the room or extra income to start a collection.
"The whole collectible thing is going away," he says. "As luck would have I have time, money and space."
