I\'m looking for a wrapper that distills zlib to:
You could try to grab the code from another FOSS project. ScummVM, for example, has a highly portable Zlib wrapper (implementation, header) with all the functions you need, plus an OO layer for interfacing generically with any other kind of archive.
Maybe that's a good starting point? The wrapper functions are totally standalone and portable (heck, they even work on a Nintendo DS), but the OO layer depends on many custom classes which may be hard to add to your own project.