RADIKON

Radikon, radical wines Friuli Venezia Giulia

Radikon is a winery in Oslavia, a district of the city of Gorizia in Friuli Venezia Giulia. The origins of the winery date back to 1948, when Edoardo Radikon started farming and breeding in the vineyards, which were destroyed together with many buildings during the First World War. In the early 1980s, the farm was handed down to his son Stanko, who devoted himself completely to wine.

Those years saw the development of new technologies in the wine world, such as the use of steel to produce wines that tended to be fresh and drinkable, but Stanko was not interested in following trends and soon returned to using the traditional wood used by his father, bringing the first barriques into the cellar. In 1995 he began to use large truncated cone vats where long macerations of the white grapes are carried out, an ancient technique used by farmers to facilitate spontaneous fermentation and enrich the wine with polyphenolic substances to preserve the wines from oxidation.

Thanks to this approach, Stanko's name has begun to be recognised as a reference point in the natural wine movement in Italy and his wines, often known as 'orange wines', are the result of a radical approach, both in the vineyard and in the cellar. In the vineyard, yields are very low, no chemicals are used, and harvesting is manual and carried out only when the grapes have reached optimal ripeness. In the cellar, fermentation is spontaneous, using only indigenous yeasts; there is no addition of sulphur dioxide, not even in bottling, and ends with a very long maturation in casks and refinement in the bottle.