When you decant red wine, you are trying to do two things: separate the sediment from the wine and allow the wine to breathe. Over time, sediment in the wine will separate and settle at the bottle of the bottle. By decanting, you are pouring the wine into another container, the decanter, so that you may leave that sediment behind in the bottle

As 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 letting it breathe, the flavors are released and the wine tastes much different than straight out of the bottle. You want as much surface area as possible, the more wine that touches the air, the better. It’s recommended that you let it breathe for half an hour to an hour and never more than eight.

How does that apply to scotch? I don’t believe it does. 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. If you do, well then the added subtlety produced by decanting would likely be wasted on you.

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!).

(Photo: experiment33)

The primary reason why you want to use a special glass is because it allows you the ability to both smell and sip the scotch at the same time. As long as the glass affords you that ability, it’ll work for scotch purposes. The idea is that you’ll want to swirl the scotch around in the glass and then smell the fragrances and aromas that waft up to your nose. A traditional whiskey tumbler is not an ideal glass, even though it offers you the sip and smell ability, because it was designed for drinking scotch and sodas. However, not there’s no reason to be a snob, if all you have is a plastic Solo cup, you can still enjoy scotch!