An opener worthy of the wine

Most people pay corkscrews little mind. They're perfectly content with the free one from the local wine shop; or the cheap double-winged version; or even the Swiss army knife. There are battery-operated corkscrews and cumbersome models that operate with a press and a pull.

Sommeliers the world over rely overwhelmingly on a simple device known as the waiter's friend or the wine key. Essentially a knifelike handle with a spiral worm for inserting into the cork and a hinged fulcrum for resistance, it has stood the test of time since it was patented in Germany in 1882. Basic versions go for less than $10.

Enter the Code-38 wine knife from Australia, engineered with the highest principles of design and top-flight materials. It retails from $220 to $410.

Unlike my cheap home corkscrew, the Code-38 offers the solid heft of a fine tool. The basic $220 model is made of solid stainless steel. The foil blade is a curved steel arc that can be resharpened on a stone.

The fulcrum is a single-hinge design rather than the doublehinge I have on my Pulltap's, intended as a safety net for amateurs who can't always get the corkscrew in the right spot.

The Code-38's single-hinge is so precisely engineered that I have yet to meet the cork I could not extract effortlessly.

For $410, you can have the Code-38 Pro Stealth, "a complete blend of blasted textures and vaporized titanium-based finishes," says the Web catalog.

I lent my $220 model to Michael Madrigale, the sommelier at Bar Boulud in New York City. He liked it well enough, but balked at the price.

"It's like the $200 hamburger," he said. "It's like reinventing something that's already perfect."

But Chaad Thomas, a partner in U.S. Wine Imports and a former sommelier, called it "a gorgeous piece."

"It was superb to be able to extend the knife with just one hand," he said. "You could use it really quickly, and it's very durable. As a sommelier, I would actually wear wine keys out."

There have been other expensive waiter's friends. Laguiole, a French cutlery brand, has been renowned for its corkscrews for more than a century.

Jeffrey Toering, the Code-38's designer, had been an instrument fitter in the Australian Air Force, which he likened to being a watchmaker. The idea for the Code-38 came to him in a restaurant in the 1990s, when he watched a waiter use a "cheap plastic wine key" to open a nice bottle of wine.

"The caliber of corkscrew did not match the level of the wine or the restaurant," he wrote in an e-mail from Australia.

So began an odyssey of trial and error, of testing designs and materials, and comparing sources. He inspected worms from around the world before settling on one made in France. He says the Code-38 is "fully rebuildable" and covered by a lifetime warranty.

Mr. Toering assembles each one individually. So far, he says, he has sold 137.

"I think the Laguiole and similar products from that region are brilliant, and I'd like to think that the Code-38 can sit among them as an equal," he said. "In our world of cheap throwaway products, it's just nice to use something that has been designed and made without consideration for just meeting a price point."