Château LAGUIOLE corkscrew Grand Cru Olive wood

Two wide bolsters, built for intensive service

The Château LAGUIOLE® Grand Cru is the House's sommelier corkscrew designed for intensive service. It keeps the lines of the Château LAGUIOLE® Classic, the first luxury sommelier knife, launched in 1993, and reinforces them with two wide stainless steel bolsters, the metal caps that cover each end of the handle. Where the Classic has one, the Grand Cru carries two: they enhance both the line and the sturdiness of the tool. Everything else is the mechanism that built the brand's reputation: a forged bee on the spring, guilloché work (the decorative engraving chiselled along the back of the spring), a serrated foil cutter, and a body and lever in Sandvik 12C27 stainless steel. This model is made for the sommelier who opens many bottles every service, and for the wine lover who wants a tool built to last. It comes in 21 handle materials, from wood to mother-of-pearl, in a brushed or mirror finish, and engraving is free. The olive tree grows slowly, which gives a dense wood with a swirling blonde and brown grain. Among Château LAGUIOLE® sommelier corkscrews, the Grand Cru is best understood next to the Classic: the same 11.4 cm closed length, the same 4.06 cm foil cutter, the same steel, but two bolsters instead of one and 100 g instead of 90 g. The Edge is a Grand Cru with coloured edge liners, called spacers, in blue, red or yellow. The Melchior keeps a single bolster and adopts a wide, generous handle (95 g). The Best Sommelier of the World collection offers, with one or two bolsters, a model named after each winner of the ASI competition. For the same material, the price gap between Classic and Grand Cru is small (black horn: 225 € for the Classic, 230 € for the Grand Cru); the choice comes down to how often you use it and which silhouette you prefer. Château LAGUIOLE® was born in 1993 on the initiative of Guy Vialis, a sommelier who wanted to turn a service tool into a work of art; the Classic was the first luxury sommelier knife. After Guy Vialis died in 2016, the brand was taken over at the end of 2017 by LIGNE W, the house founded in 2008 by Sébastien Lézier; the collections were revisited and the technical components refined, in the spirit of the founder. Since 2021, Château LAGUIOLE® has been one of the brands of Maison Château LAGUIOLE. Every corkscrew is made by hand in the manufacture in Thiers (Puy-de-Dôme), the French capital of cutlery. The winners of the ASI Best Sommelier of the World competition each have a Château LAGUIOLE® model in their name, from Shinya Tasaki (1995) to Raimonds Tomsons (2023). Each piece comes with a QR-code membership card whose online registration activates the lifetime warranty.