Bertolli Chianti Bottle

Object Details

Description

Americans of the post-World War II era were not wine drinkers. In the 1950’s, wine consumption was generally confined either to a few well-traveled people near each coast who associated wine with fine dining, both customarily French, or to members of ethnic communities who had long drunk both homemade and imported wines with foods common to their community. Infrequent wine consumers often drank “Chianti” at inexpensive Italian-American restaurants where they consumed their spaghetti and lasagna with wine from familiar straw covered green bottles (fiaschi) placed on the red checked tablecloths. The same bottles, once emptied, served as candleholders and decorative touches in these neighborhood gathering places, and these same straw-covered bottles of Italian wine were often among the few wines available at liquor stores throughout the country.

Students, communards, beatniks, and Italian-American restaurant goers alike used the emptied Chianti bottles, with their peasant straw fiaschi, from the 1950’s through the 1980’s, both as cheap drink, lighting, and decoration until the availability of better quality American and European wines changed their drinking habits.. In 2012, the little straw covered Chianti bottles, with their residue from the many hours of candlewax dripped down their sides, are available in second hand stores and online purchasing centers for those who keep a sentimental attachment to the decorative markers of their youth.

This particular bottle, date 1950, was purchased on e-Bay by just such a sentimentalist, a museum curator who remembered long hours spent in the 1960’s reading poetry with friends, discussing politics, and drinking cheap wine from bottles such as this one.

Location

Currently not on view

Credit Line

Gift of Rayna Green

1950-1970

ID Number

2011.3054.01

nonaccession number

2011.3054

catalog number

2011.3054.01

Object Name

bottle

Chianti bottle

candle holder

Physical Description

glass (overall material)

organic material (unspecified) (overall material)

Measurements

overall: 11 in x 6 in; 27.94 cm x 15.24 cm

See more items in

Home and Community Life: Domestic Life

Food

FOOD: Transforming the American Table 1950-2000

National Museum of American History

Subject

Food Culture

kitchen

Record ID

nmah_1419737

Metadata Usage (text)

CC0

GUID (Link to Original Record)

https://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ng49ca746ad-7f78-704b-e053-15f76fa0b4fa