Every culture marks a threshold with a sound. The church bell was a town's entire communication system: it told the hour, announced a birth, mourned a death, warned of fire, called people to mass, to meeting, to arms. A gunshot starts a race, a ship's horn marks a departure, a police siren cuts through the noise of a city, an air raid siren stops it altogether. These are functional sounds, carrying real information that silence cannot.
The pop of a cork is something else entirely. It does nothing that the occasion does not already do without it; the bottle is in hand, the glasses are on the table, the moment is plainly visible. It is, in the strictest sense, purely ceremonial.
And yet it persists, across cultures and centuries, as the one sound that makes a celebration feel official. Shame about screw caps.