Some decanters do command big money. For instance, a Beilby decorated sugarloaf fetched £7,000 at the sale of the contents of Harveys Wine Museum in October. Conversely, this commentator has bought about 200 antique decanters in the past year for a combined total of £500, albeit some unstoppered, some with minor chips.

Aside from their role in decorative and social history, decanters remain functional, still capable of fulfilling their intended purpose, that of improving even cheap wines and enhancing the ambience of a dinner table.
The plain fact is that decanters work. The experts are unanimous: decanting broadens the taste of most red and some white wines, and surprisingly, even champagne. Yet with wine consumption at record levels, why do so few people actually use them? Does the vast majority, which pours direct from the bottle, really prefer strangulated wines to those that have been allowed to breathe? Do the hosts who accept wine bottles on their tables place them next to SAXA salt packets and serve their guests directly from frying pans?

Perhaps the resistance to decanting is a question of aesthetics, that modem taste prefers mass-produced wine bottles to hand-formed and decorated decanters? Perhaps decanters and decanting are viewed as pretentious or arcane. Perhaps the time taken to transfer wine from bottle to decanter is too laborious or that the process demands too much forethought.

Zoomorphic flask.
Glass flasks formed as animals or humans have been produced across Europe since at least the 17th century. Animal claret jugs, c.1880s, by Alexander Crichton especially collected.
This example: Bohemian or German bear-shaped flask, c.1675, in forest Waldglas, with applied limbs and a detachable head that doubles as a stopper and beaker.
(Glasgalerie Kovacek, Vienna)