Typically, wine was cooled by the addition of chilled water or snow-ice to wine in a krater, and that method pre-dated and outlasted the psykter. Because the process of cooling wine could be achieved in a number of other ways, none of which required the psykter, its redundancy appears to have quickly made it obsolete. Although the psykter did have its specific function, nevertheless, it was almost certainly something of a whimsical device, an objet du jour, which will have given the symposion’s guests some aesthetic titillation and the host kudos for good taste. Even proportionately to other wine utensils of its time it is comparatively rare, with few examples being found. It is possible that it came about as a response to avoiding mixing contaminated snow-ice directly in wine, as it was known that this could cause illness, but this is unlikely as the alcohol in wine has useful sterilizing properties. The fact of its brevity combined with there being a number of simpler methods of cooling wine suggests that this shape was merely a fad.
The psykter, as distinct from other coolers, is a vase which has a mushroom-shaped body, and was produced for only a short period of time during the late-sixth to mid-fifth centuries, with almost all of this type dating to between 520 and 480 BCE. It was used as a wine cooler, and specifically as part of the elite sympotic set in the ancient Greek symposium. A psykter (in Greek ψυκτήρ "cooler") is a type of Greek vase that is characterized by a bulbous body set on a high, narrow foot.
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