Ribolla Gialla 50 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 the prolonged macerations of his grandparents, at a time when the entire Friuli region 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 limited yields. After manual harvesting into crates, the grapes are destemmed and placed in truncated cone 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 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.