NEW YORK – A corkscrew. An affordable set of glasses. A bottle stopper.

Those used to be all a wine drinker needed to enjoy a bottle. But in recent years, it’s been all the rage to spend money – sometimes many thousands of dollars – on accessories to help you open, drink, store, even decorate your wine.

Forget those kitschy little charms to hook on wine stems that were hot at parties a few years back. Now fancy bags for dressing up the whole bottle can run more than $80 and special under-the-counter refrigerators sell for thousands.

“A lot of this wine game is ego,” says Adam Strum, who runs the wine accessories catalog and magazine Wine Enthusiast out of Elmsford, N.Y. “You want to display it to your friends. There’s a pleasure. There’s a pride. The whole thing about wine is image. That’s really what’s the driver for wine accessories.”

In fact, Strum says, the wine accessories market is a near-billion-dollar industry that includes everything from inexpensive corkscrews in supermarket checkout aisles to pricey stemware designed for specific wines.

The multi-thousand-dollar wine refrigerators and cellars alone are responsible for more than half the industry’s value, Strum says.

And it’s not just specialty catalogs that are profiting from this. As much as 5 percent of a good wine store’s business can come from accessories, Strum says.

“In the last 10 years, wine consumption has exploded,” he says. “People are thinking about wine more. You have more creativity, more thought and all the things surrounding wine are there.”

So when did wine fans start spending their money on accouterments of wine in addition to the wine itself?

Strum points to the mid-1980s, when, he says, people started buying more wine than they could drink at one time and had to come up with ways to store it.

Bob Smiley, a wine economist at University of California-Davis, says the nesting effect of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks got more people drinking wine at home. And if you’re drinking wine at home, he says, you need to stock up on all the gadgets to go with it.

As Smiley puts it, “If you want to spend money on wine accessories, there’s almost no limit to what you can spend. … You scale it to your own ability to consume.”

With many wine drinkers thinking along these grander lines and wine becoming more popular by the year, Strum says, the market for accessories will only grow. “The likelihood of it diminishing,” he says, “is remote.”