Drink wine? Don't complicate it.

The Rabbit is a flimsy, plastic-molded wine-opening device with too many hinges that resembles a cartoon bunny. It was a gift from my brother. The Rabbit (Metrokane, $69.99) now joins last year's electric wine-cooling sleeve, mystifying wine-preserving vacuum pumps, stainless "barometric stoppers," and the iPhone application that, sigh, chooses the "right" wine.

Wine is a pleasure to be enjoyed, not a problem to be solved. There are, of course, more sensible alternatives for all of these.

When you are served wine in a restaurant, the waiter uses a simple fold-out corkscrew. It looks like a Swiss Army knife. Screw it into the cork, and the metal catch rests on the bottle lip. Push down, lift half the cork, and the second catch now rests on the lip. Push down again, and the cork is out. It costs less than $10 (www.wine.com and www.winestuff.com). It's fun and will school the guests who bought you the Rabbit (also fun).

Once the bottle is open, you would expect to drink the wine. Ah, but wine-gadget manufacturers don't make any money on that. Some scare you into needing wine-temperature-control sleeves and boxes. Enter the type of wine on a cryptic LED panel (hello 1990s VCR) and it maintains the bottle at an often-undisclosed temperature. These always-on thermoelectric devices eat an obscene amount of electricity. Do you want a bill that suggests you heat your home with hair dryers?

Don't obsess on temperature. Red wines should be cool, somewhat below room temperature, and are differently wonderful at different temperatures. A drafty winter windowsill is a fine chilling spot. Some soft (low-tannin) reds like Pinot Noir, Beaujolais-Villages, and Zinfandel can go in the fridge. You can even put them on ice. Remember the face you made when your Mom did that?

Unless your Sauvignon Blanc is suffering from scarlet fever, you do not need to put it in an ice bath. Throw away the insulating wine sleeve tchochke you got at MacWorld Boston.

Sometimes wine drips down the side of the bottle. It doesn't mean you need pop-in wine-pouring spouts (Wine Finer by Nuance, $49.95; Sommelier by Calla, $12.99). They look silly and often backfire an uncontrollable jet of wine.

In Italy, and in my house, we drink reds out of short glasses (six for $5 at www.ikea.com). They are excellent for all reds or whites and don't tip over easily. For a touch of class, fill the glass a bit less than half-full. This is how it's done in Italy.

Every sitcom has an episode where someone opens a bottle and declares that the wine "needs to breathe." It is true that for many reds (especially those under $50), oxygen helps bring out a softer, richer taste. Wine decanters are expensive and superfluous. Ditto for "wine aerators" (Ressort, $34.99) and "aerating funnels" (Wine Enthusiast, $29.99).

Don't complicate matters. Pouring the wine accomplishes the same thing. Oxygenation is why you'll often like a wine more as you drink it. That, and you may be getting tipsy.

A Boston company, Drync, produces the "Drync wine" application for iPhone. "When you are confronted by a wine menu," cofounder Bill Kirtley tells me in his Cambridge office, "Drync can be a big help." I tried it recently. Nose-to-iPhone, I'm scrolling through a voluminous search on 2006 Mas De Gourgonnier: "perfumes of pine and garrigue. . ." What is garrigue? The waitress at Franklin Southie interrupts. "What are you doing?" My friends are annoyed.

I look up sheepishly, "Do you have Pinot Noir?"