Redesigning the ubiquitous waiter's corkscrew.

My first issue with the traditional waiter's wine key is the lever. To move up to the second lever, you have to let go and reposition the entire lever arm to get onto that lower ratchet. And then you also have this much smaller grip. Instead of the ratcheting occurring where the lever arm meets the neck of the bottle, we moved that ratchet up to the pivot point between the main body of the wine key and the lever arm. You have this nice grip point here that you can hold onto and you never have to let go of this connection between the lever arm and the bottle. That brings us to the second issue, the grip. As the lever starts to tilt upward, there's this increased possibility that your hand or your finger starts to slip off. The solution was pretty simple, which is taking the end of it and bending it downward. It prevents your hand from being able to slip off. It gives you just a little bit more leverage and more reliability and confidence. And it looks better. The third and final issue is the lock. When you are done opening your bottle of wine, I want it to feel securely closed. The traditional waiter's wine key uses these friction rivets. It will, over time, get loose. The solution that we came up to is one that you can hear it and see it and feel it click closed. It's being achieved through a ball detent. We were able to use the same ball detent in a second hole to hold it in the open position. When we were working on this project with Andre Mack, he kept talking about how designing your own wine key as a sommelier is essentially like designing your own lightsaber, your identifying tool. That was a concept that rang in our ears as we were working on this. Diving into the minutiae, into the fine details, in our effort to make this what we now call it, which is the best wine key.