Italian wine bottles

[bar...@uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu]

Some friends and I were in an Italian restaurant recently and got to
talking about the wine bottles with the woven basket attached to the
bottom. Does anybody out here know of any reason for the basket other
than aesthetic? Maybe a historic significance.

Richard R. Barton
Center for Supercomputing Research and Development
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ARPANET: barton%uic...@uiuc.arpa (or domain-wise bar...@uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu)
CSNET: barton%uic...@uiuc.csnet
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[Gray]

> ... wine bottles with the woven basket attached to the bottom.
> ... know of any reason for the basket other than aesthetic?
> Maybe a historic significance.

I would suspect that the main reason is the fact cardboard had not yet been
used for boxes. :-).. If there were a basket with a loop/hoop in it, you
could attach it to your mode of transportation. i.e. Horse, Donkey, etc.

Daniel Gray
AT&T Bell Labs
ihuxp!dgray

[p...@shasta.uucp]

>Some friends and I were in an Italian restaurant recently and got to
>talking about the wine bottles with the woven basket attached to the
>bottom. Does anybody out here know of any reason for the basket other
>than aesthetic? Maybe a historic significance.

Yes, there is a reason: If you removed the basket, you would quickly
discover that the bottom of the bottle is round and will not stand up
on its own. The bottles are called fiasci (sp?) (this is the origin
of the word fiasco) and, I believe, have traditionally been used to
bottle some of the lighter Chianti's. I have heard that they are
becomming increasingly rare (probably due to cost).