Sometimes it’s nice to have a display in which you have whisky in a decanter without all the commercial labels. While it’s good to let scotch breathe a little in your glass, with or without the addition of water, putting it in a decanter is mostly for looks (and there’s nothing wrong with that!). If you do, well then the added subtlety produced by decanting would likely be wasted on you. While it’s nice for the scotch to breathe, the reality is that you will likely not finish a decanter of scotch within eight hours. How does that apply to scotch? I don’t believe it does. It’s recommended that you let it breathe for half an hour to an hour and never more than eight. You want as much surface area as possible, the more wine that touches the air, the better. By letting it breathe, the flavors are released and the wine tastes much different than straight out of the bottle. This is not an issue for whisky.Īs for letting the wine breathe, it releases some of the wine’s aromas, which have been trapped in a bottle for however many years. By decanting, you are pouring the wine into another container, the decanter, so that you may leave that sediment behind in the bottle. Over time, sediment in the wine will separate and settle at the bottle of the bottle. When you decant red wine, you are trying to do two things: separate the sediment from the wine and allow the wine to breathe.

Cool whiskey decanters