Wine Terms: "Fiasco"

Most of us will recognize Lady & the Tramp.
Many of us will recognize the wine bottle, serving as a candle-holder in the foreground, as Chianti.
For ages, these bottles – rotund, wrapped in a wicker basket – were familiar to consumers. Such a distinctive bottle can be a fabulous marketing device. Fabulous that is, until quality slips and/or the expanding diversity of the market shows your wines as dilute plonk. At this point the distinctive bottle was seen as an albatross, not an asset... and was abandoned.
Too bad.
I generally dislike non-standard bottles (to take just one reason: they are a nuisance to stack in the cellar), but this one carried such an amusing bit of wine etymology in its name... the Fiasco.
The Italian word “fiasco” has its origin in Medieval Latin. Here it meant a flask, or a small container for holding wine. Later (as Latin became Italian, and after glass bottles were invented), “fiasco” became the Italian term referring to (any) bottle.
How “fiasco” came to also mean mishap or failure is lost to history.
There are, however, some delightful theories.
The Fiasco, had a rounded base. The resulting instability was one reason for its wicker casing. A tippy bottle (of red wine no less) is a rather obvious route to mishap.
Glassblowers may have been in the habit of salvaging flubbed projects to make (everyday) bottles. Thus “failure” links itself to “bottle”.
In one way or another, by the 19th century the word “fiasco” took on a second meaning. Its seen first around the Italian theatre. “Far fiasco” (literally, make a bottle) meant to suffer to flop or make an embarrassing mistake on stage. From there, slang spread itself to wider usage... and by the mid 19th century, into English.

We may bemoan the loss of such a distinctive bottle, with an amusing name.
We may take away a lesson about the danger of standing out from the crowd.
We may decide its been too long since we saw Lady & the Tramp.