🍷 Fiasco (bottle)

A fiasco is a round-bellied bottle in a straw basket, a symbol of old Chianti. The Italian word fiasco means bottle or flask. Such bottles were made of thin blown glass and have a round bottom, so they were wrapped in straw or reed: this let the bottle stand and kept it from breaking.

In the past Chianti was bottled in the fiasco, and the bottle became a symbol of Tuscany. Many remember it from Italian restaurants, where an empty basketed bottle serves as a candlestick. But the bottle is awkward for storage: it cannot be laid flat, the basket is made by hand and costs a lot, and it is not suited to long ageing of wine.

So today Chianti is bottled in ordinary Bordeaux-style bottles. The fiasco survives mostly for simple wines, souvenirs and tourist goods. But Tuscan producers sometimes release wines in a fiasco as a tribute to tradition. The fiasco is a wine bottle, but not a standard shape; it is a historical feature. Interestingly, the same word also means a failure in English, though how the two meanings are linked is unclear.