A quick Google, will reveal a huge number of things that you can do with wine corks. The problem is that most of them involve sticking them all over the walls of your house or creating hideous decorations and bits of furniture out of them.

There seem to be an insane number of articles on the net telling me to use my old corks to make a noticeboard, a trivet, to cover my walls, or make a cork wreath. Why on earth would I want a cork wreath?

I don’t want to do any of that because I have a sense of aesthetics, but I also don’t want to throw them all into the bin, so I’ve had a think/research, and come up with the following things that they are actually useful for, and that don’t offend my eyes.

1. Cook an octopus – Controversial this one, a lot of people, including a number of proffessional chefs will tell you that it works, and a lot of others will tell you it’s complete bollocks.

   The theory is that if you throw a cork into the pot when you are boiling squid or octopus, it helps to tenderise them and helps prevent them from going rubbery.

2. Make a stew – In exactly the same way as above, some people claim that if you throw a wine cork or two into a stew when you are cooking it with cheap cuts of meat, and it will help the meat to tenderise.

3. Give them to your cat – It’s hardly a great way of recycling as ultimately you still have the same cork later, but I have never met a cat who didn’t love playing with wine corks.

4. Use them as drainage – Chop each cork into a couple of pieces and put them in the bottom of plant pots to act as drainage.

5. Compost them – Whole corks will break down incredibly slowly, but if you chop them up into small pieces then you can throw them into your compost bin with no problem.

6. Clean a knife – If you have high carbon kitchen knives then it is easy to scratch them by using an abrasive cleaning pad. You can avoid it by putting some washing up liquid on a cork and scrubbing them with that instead. I know it sounds weird, but it works!

7. Start a fire – Keep old corks soaking in a jar of rubbing alcohol, or other highly flammable liquid, and then you can use them as firelighters to get nice and toasty in the winter, or get a summer barbecue going nicely.

8. Stop oil burning – I have no idea of the science behind this, and I haven’t actually tried it yet, but I have read the same thing in a few different places. Aparently, putting a cork into a frying pan will raise the burning point of the oil. Anyone tried it?

9. Make a fishing float – Pretty self explanatory really, isn’t it.