Ribolla Gialla 100 cl Venezia Giulia IGT 2020 Radikon

Radikon's Ribolla Gialla is not an easy wine to explain, and perhaps that's for the best. It is the wine that, more than any other, bears the name of Stanko Radikon — the winemaker from Oslavia who, in the 1990s, decided to revive his grandparents' extended maceration techniques at a time when all of Friuli was moving in the opposite direction. Ribolla is the grape variety with which Stanko built his research: thick skins, structural acidity, an aromatic capacity that only reveals itself with time and prolonged contact. The vines grow on the Ponka — Oslavia's stratified clay marl, compact as rock deep down and crumbly on the surface, which slowly releases minerals for years. The vines are thirty years old, with 8,000 plants per hectare and low yields. After manual harvesting into crates, the grapes are destemmed and placed in truncated conical oak vats where they ferment spontaneously in contact with the skins for 3-4 months, with three or four manual punch-downs per day. Then, large oak barrels for over three years, followed by 18 months in the bottle. The wine is released onto the market approximately six years after the harvest. Zero sulfites, zero filtration, zero fining. Today, the winery is run by Saša Radikon, Stanko's son, with the same unchanging philosophy.

The 1-liter format is a deliberate choice, not an aesthetic one: Radikon adopted it to emphasize the convivial nature of his wines — meant to be shared at the table, not hoarded.