Decanters come in so many shapes and sizes hence choosing one can be fairly confusing. First of all, all decanters are beautiful hence it is always generally being chosen based on its aesthetic reason. Never the less, the shape and size of the decanter is actually correlated to its usage.

You would first need to ask yourself what type of wines do you usually serve or drink and what are the volume or no of bottles being served. By the way, although generally decanter is being used on red wine, white wine on the other hand can be decant too.

For young red wines, it would benefit greatly from decanter with a wider bottom as this increases the surface size for the wine to breath. On the contrary for old wine, it is recommended to use a decanter with a smaller bottom as you would not want to aerate the wines too fast and furious way which may cause the vintage wine to go flat.

For newbies in using decanter, I would normally recommend to get a bigger volume decanter as this would aid when you swirl and decant compare to a small decanter which may be hard to hold by its neck with its fuller volume.