When it comes to opening wine, corkscrews have their own twist

One day, all the world's wine bottles will probably be topped with metal screwcaps, and corkscrews, not to mention corks, will be rendered obsolete.

Until then, opening a bottle of wine presents a perfect opportunity to impress dinner or party guests with your dexterity -- or with your choice of a gadget that requires no dexterity whatsoever. Some of the simplest corkscrews take some practice to master but possess an attractive compactness, while others with much greater bulk do the job easily with little involvement from the operator.

Whether to go with tidy or mighty seems to depend as much on your tendencies toward gearheadedness as much as anything else. When I enlisted friends to bring bottles of wine to a testing party recently, they also brought strong opinions about their favorite methods of opening wine, which spanned both extremes.

Lever-style models originated by Screwpull (a division of French cookware maker Le Creuset) have an undeniable appeal. I tested one made by Connoisseur, sold at Costco, but a similar one can be found at a similar price at Chef's Catalog; these are knockoffs of the more expensive Rabbit, which itself is a knockoff of the even more expensive Screwpull, whose Elegance model I also tested. Both work flawlessly, so there seems little reason to spend $100 when you can spend one-fifth of that. These work like so: After removing the foil with a separate but included cutter, just clamp it onto the bottle with one hand, then close and open the lever with the other. The auger plunges into the cork as the lever closes, and swoops it right out as the lever opens. Repeat the motion, and it'll recork the bottle airtight.

The main drawback to these devices is that they are quite heavy, even unwieldy -- not the sort of thing you can pull out of a pocket, no matter how baggy your pants are.

One model, also quite bulky, uses technology where none is needed, and the result is downright scary. The CorkPops bills itself as a "screwless wine opener," employing a low-pressure propellant cartridge to make opening wine seem like opening champagne. You insert the device's needle all the way through the cork, press on the cartridge, and the propellant causes the cork to pop out. But one read-through of the warning label (my favorite line: "A flawed bottle could rupture"), and we were afraid to be in the same room with this thing, let alone use it. For the record, none of our bottles were flawed, so none ruptured, but how do you know when a bottle is flawed, anyway?

On the other end of the spectrum is a little two-pronged extractor made by Ahh Super that could hardly be more minimal. One of my guests swore by this method, and I have tried these before, but I again had a hard time getting the hang of it. I rocked the prongs down onto either side, between cork and bottle, then twisted and pulled while holding the bottle between my knees. It took several tries to make this work without the opener slipping off the cork -- an even trickier prospect with a resin cork. This style of opener is supposed to work best on old corks, with the idea that since it doesn't pierce the cork it is less likely to break it, but given that none of the wine I buy is more than a few years old, this hardly seems worth the trouble.

Waiter's corkscrews are almost as low-tech. Looking a bit like a pocketknife, they use a little arm to provide leverage against the bottle so that after you insert the worm, you can lift the cork -- but without the right touch you can bend or break it. One called the Double Power corkscrew adds an innovation: a second leverage arm that you employ when the cork is partway out, helping you pull straight up instead of to the side. The advance pays off, making this approach much safer.

The good old two-winged opener (I tried one made by Henckels) also has its fans, partly because it is so basic. You insert the screw's tip into the cork's center, twist the top, and as it enters the cork the wings raise up, like a little figure doing a slow-motion jumping jack. Pull them back down, and the cork comes up -- if not all the way out, pretty close. Of all the models tested, though, this one lacked a foil cutter to help prepare the bottle for uncorking, although the tip of the screw can manage that task well enough.

My favorite was probably Screwpull's streamlined pocket model, which weighs a fraction of its lever versions and captured my affection through its sheer simplicity and effectiveness. It does require a bit of initial setup to rearrange the three pieces from their storage positions, but then it fits easily and steadily onto the bottle, and once you start turning, that's the only motion required. First it inserts the corkscrew, then it starts lifting the cork out.

Best of all, though, this lightweight device packs up tight and slips into a hiding place just as easily as a waiter's corkscrew, making it perfect for those times when the guests you aim to impress aren't at your dining table, but are sitting on a picnic blanket.

Joe Yonan can be reached at yonan@globe.com.