You don’t need to keep this in the tool shed, next to the weed-wacker. Rather, keep it in the junk drawer of your kitchen, next to the corkscrews and other oft-unused gadets — it’s cheap and effective enough to be worthy of a place in there.

Every once in a while you come across a bottle — usually a fairly expensive one — that has a gob of wax covering the cork instead of the usual lead foil. While it is a more effective means of securing the wine inside, and it makes your bottle seem all that more important, getting the wax off is a pain in the asterisk.

Usually I bang on the top of the wax with a heavy-handled corkscrew, which is only slightly effective and sprays shattered pieces of wax shrapnel all over the place. Sometimes, the wax is only a thin layer, and you can corkscrew right through it … but then you end up with wax stuck in the screw. The Wax-Wacker is a better answer for both types of wax sealers. It’s well-shaped and weighted for wacking over the top of the bottle, but also has a spoon-like edge that you can use to carve into the wax if you prefer not to have the shrapnel all over your kitchen. That edge is also perfect for wedging under the wax caps and flipping off the cork.

A good stocking stuffer for your favorite wine geek.

This is a great buy if your wine lover is like me – often emptying only half a bottle. Yes, the half-bottle trick works well enough, but it’s a lot easier to use the Vacu-Vin to preserve an unfinished bottle of wine.

Another reason I like the Vacu-Vin is that it enables me to open two or three bottles in an evening and not feel guilty about it. Often, I’ll open a bottle and find that it doesn’t quite go right with my meal — and being the geek that I am, I’ll open another (and another) to try and get a closer-to-perfect match. Or, I may want to have a glass of white before moving to a glass of red toward the end of the meal. Since the Vacu-Vin comes with two stoppers, you can keep two bottles fresh for the next few days — although if your wine lover is as geeky as me, you might want to purchase additional stoppers for the stocking.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be suggesting a bunch of gifts that are ideal for the wine geek in your life — maybe even for yourself.

Some of the gifts are merely stocking stuffers — small, and ten bucks or less. Some cost a bit more, and are worthy enough to warrant wrapping. A few even go into three digits. Here and there we’ll even offer up a special bottle of wine that would make a fine gift.

So keep checking back as more holiday gifts for the wine geek are posted here.