Show up at a holiday party with your gift of wine wrapped in a plain paper bag, and eyebrows are liable to go up. These days, wine is arriving in designer bags and increasingly intricate covers.

The winemakers at Ecco Domani have partnered with four emerging fashion designers to offer a wine bottle-bag collection. The line retails from $10 for a bright blue-patterned synthetic bag that can hold two wine bottles to $85 for a burgundy, quilted, leather-trimmed shoulder bag that carries one bottle.

“The more expensive ones could be your personal wine tote,” says Elinor Cowan, an Ecco Domani spokeswoman. “If you’re going to spend $65, you don’t want to give it away.”

Home goods retailer Pier 1 Imports’ latest catalogue features what it calls a “bottle dressing” – a bottle cover made of feathers, sequins, beads and ribbons that hangs over a bottle of wine. It retails for $8.

The really high-end? For those looking to ship or travel with up to a dozen bottles, the Wine Enthusiast catalog offers a shiny silver aluminum travel wine safe that retails for $399 and costs $40 to ship.

And Winepacks.com sells molded fiber clamshell-shaped wine bottle shippers that fit easily into cardboard boxes. Kits are available for shipping up to a dozen bottles and cost from $17.95 to $67.95.

Accessories for drinking wine

Opening, pouring and capping wine is becoming increasingly high end. The commonplace wing corkscrew opener has been upgraded to waiter-style versions that can cost upward of $200, or has been replaced with wall- and counter-mounted models.

Once a bottle is open, decanting the wine, allowing it to set and settle, is now more popular, making decanters a hot seller, says Adam Strum of Wine Enthusiast magazine and catalog.

“Only very serious people were decanting wine; now everybody’s decanting wine,” he says.

And while pouring wine into stemware sets from major retailers will suit most, Riedel-brand glassware aims to offer differently shaped glasses for each type of wine, such as narrow-rims for Chardonnay and small bowls for Cabernet or Bordeaux.

The theory is that the different shapes allow the wine to settle on certain areas of the tongue, allowing the consumer to best enjoy the characteristics of each wine. Such glasses can retail for up to $95 each.

Have wine left over? Instead of just sticking the cork back in the bottle, some wine drinkers use expensive gadgets to pump out extra oxygen, which can spoil wine.

Two industry leaders Strum points to are PEK, which offers affordable bottle stoppers, to more expensive wine preservation and temperature control systems. VacuVin makes pumps that extract air from open wine bottles.

The really high end? A $130 wine chilling system from Winesceptre that features a metal rod and cap-like pourer that fit into and then on your wine bottle. It keeps chilled wine at the perfect serving temperature.

The VinTemp Infrared Wine Thermometer is for the super-high-tech. For about $30, this pocket-size platinum-finished thermometer tells you the precise temperature of wine without having to pop the cork.

Accessories for storing wine

Refrigerators the size of dishwashers made especially for storing wine at certain temperatures are the new must-have for wine connoisseurs. Some people even build elaborate wall units for kitchens or whole cellars, says California wine economist Bob Smiley.

“Ten years ago it was only the most serious collectors who had the coolers,” he says. “Now they’re becoming a show-off or glamour item in the home.”

Strum cites Eurocave brand wine refrigerators as a popular seller. “In the last five years,” he says, the wine refrigerator has become what the VCR was in the 1980s and the cell phone was in the 1990s. “In 1996, there weren’t these wine refrigerators around.”

Wine racks are another trendy storage-minded accessory. Strum puts these in two categories: decorative racks available at most retail home stores, and custom-made racking that fits in homes like furniture.

What if you want to keep just one bottle out on the counter, readily accessible? PEK’s Supremo Wine Preservation and Temperature Control Steward stores your bottle in an airtight chamber and floods it with inert Argon gas, controlling the temperature and preventing oxygen from getting inside. It retails for about $200.