These days it's pretty much essential for any wine lover to have a wine aerator on hand. It's a simple fact that giving wine time to breathe, to mix with the air to bring out the subtle flavors so that the true essence of the win comes out, is the only way to really enjoy wine as it was intended to be enjoyed.

This has meant, generally speaking, that you needed to slowly pour the wine into a decanter, mixing it with the air, and then let it sit for a while so that you were able to get the right mix. If you're having a formal dinner party, doing this can actually be part of the whole experience and added to the enjoyment of the wine.

On the other hand, if you like to have wine on a daily basis, the whole decanting process can rapidly get tiresome. Wine aerators give the best of both worlds, allowing you to enjoy all the flavors of the wine without spending all time necessary to decant it,which is a huge bonus to the dedicated wine lover.

A wine aerator is basically a piece of glassware that mix the wine your pour into with the air as it goes through it, allowing the air to mix with the wine much, much faster than if you were simply pouring it into the decanter. This is accomplished by means of the arrangement of tubes and spouts, and how well this works depends entirely on the design.

There are basically three things that you need to look at to choose the right wine aerator for you:

How Well the Aeration Works

Simply put, some aerators work better than others. The most cheaply designed won't give you anymore flavor than you would have got than if you'd merely poured the wine into a glass. At the other end of the spectrum, a truly well designed aerator will actually give you more flavors than simple decanting. What you want to look for is an aerator that was designed by sommeliers and has a good reputation.

How Easy It Is To Use

Some aerators work very at mixing the wine and the air together but are pretty much a complete loser in every other respect. The most common problem is that you have to hold the aerator above the wine glass and end up spraying the wine every where, which is a terrible thing to do to a nice wine. Make sure you look for an aerator that actually gets the wine in the glass.

How Durable It is

Wine aerators tend to be fairly fragile, since they're made of a lot of tubes and tunnels in a small glass space. Some of them are shockingly easy to break and difficult to clean without catastrophe. Your best option is to get something that can actually stand up to daily use.

The wine aerator that gives you the best mix of all three qualities is the UK's Wine aerator; the aerator does a superb job of mixing the air and wine, it actually fits into both wineglasses and decanters, and the thing is very nearly indestructible. This Wine aerator also has an attractive price, so I give it the highest recommendation.