>but really fell more
>"à l'aise" with the geometry of my Lagiole, the upstroke being
>slightly longer than with the two-step waiters friend,

I agree that using a well made implement has an innate reward, and you have a
point - geometry will vary and there is no reason, I suppose, that a single
stroke screw couldn't be adequate for almost all corks.

I guess the ideal might be a two-step Laguiole, but I don't believe they've
offered that yet.

The whole Laguiole thing puts me in mind of pens. Some people like owning a
particular sort of pen for the presumed prestige it offers - yuppie toys. Other
people may value the same thing more from the functional point of view.

I own and use a couple of beautifully made Mont Blanc fountain pens (you have
to do something with all those gold card points and a man only needs so many
toasters), and I enjoy writing with them - I've been using fountain pens since
high school. I see people with Mont Blanc ball points, and I can't help
thinking that they could only want what is in essence a fancy cover for a
generic ballpoint refill for yuppie bragging reasons, as there is little
functional reason to prefer such a pen.

The Laguile corkscrews are an intermediate case. The workmanship is admirable
and they are worth some appreciation as objets d'art, but they also function
(old crumbly corks aside for the moment) exceedingly well.

It makes me a bit nervous however when I see the yuppie wine fans pulling their
high end Laguioles from their custom leather cases in which they carry them
everywhere, never wanting to miss an opportunity to impress each other.

I suppose that I should not allow the fact that some people do that to
influence me or tempt me to class them in with other useless yuppie flash, as
they are really much more like a Mont Blanc fountain pen than a Mont Blanc
ballpoint......