For millions of Italian immigrants, the straw-covered fiasco of Chianti on the dinner table was a piece of home. Bill Nesto remembers that his father, who was born in Boston in 1914, grew up in Apulia and returned to his native city shortly before World War II, pulled a large flask from under the kitchen sink and poured himself a glass of red every night.

The bulbous bottle is an important character in Chianti Classico: The Search for Tuscany's Noblest Wine, the book that Nesto and his wife Frances Di Savino recently published. But instead of being a symbol of mid-20th century nostalgia, the fiasco represents the difficulty Chianti Classico had in preserving its reputation for quality and the extraordinary change the region has undergone in the last half-century.