Behind The Vines: Radikon
The Radikon winery is a completely family-run winery that is based in the small Italian village of Oslavia , Friuli. Although the Radikon family’s winery is located in Italy, they actually originate from the nearby neighbouring country of Slovenia; a heritage, culture and style of winemaking that Radikon has successfully made present within the essence of every single bottle of Radikon-produced wine. The family business was originally founded thirty six years ago by the head of the family, Stanko Radikon, who along his fruitful life and journey as a vigneron has constantly chopped and changed the winery’s style and approach towards producing wines for just one simple reason - to produce nothing but great quality, one hundred percent parallel to Oslavia natural wines.
Similar to as we mentioned above, Stanko was constantly experimenting with his agriculture in the vineyard as well as when he got his crops into the cellar for fermentation. One of Stanko’s greatest discoveries during that thirty six year-long career amongst his vines in Oslavia was during the year of 1995, he returned to his father’s methods which led to the realisation that the region's indiginous white wine grape, the Ribolla Gialla grape, required different handling to fully express its potential. Thanks to his father’s ways Stanko realised that the best possible way of releasing the Ribolla Gialla’s full potential was by allowing them to ferment in-contact with their skins over a seven day period, Stanko found that such a change in fermentation style extracted quite a lot more flavours and colour from the Ribolla Gialla grape.
Shortly after his discovery surrounding the Ribolla Gialla grape, Stanko and his team extended the skin-contact fermentation period from seven days to thirty days which turned out to be the perfect formula for producing a true to the land, expressive skin-contact wine. In the space of just a few years, Stanko had transformed his estate’s entire white wine producing over to this newly discovered style, which we can assure you was not initially popular amongst the wine community at all but as time went by the people (as they normally do) amongst the wine community both customers and critics slowly came around to accepting his new amber coloured wine.
Sadly during the month of September 2016, Stanko Radikon, who is widely considered one of the giants of the natural and orange wine scene, lost his long battle with cancer at the age of 62, luckily today Stanko lives on through the daily lives of his wife, two daughters and son Saša. And as we mentioned above the Radikon winery is a completely family-run winery so there was never any doubt about the winery living on once the head of the family had passed away, now the reigns have been passed down to Stanko’s son Saša who has been heavily involved with wine production in the business for the last decade, Stanko’s legacy can be assured to live on in such firm hands like his son Saša’s.
Today, Radikon’s skin-contact wines are robust and expressive of the region to say the least, they stopped using S02 in their wines back in 2003, showcasing a remarkable consistency and character with their slightly wild, deep, autumnal flavours and beguiling complexity.
Check out our entire range of Radikon here, all available for Next Day Delivery, 7 Days a Week
