Radikon Ribolla Gialla 2018

The Radikon estate in Oslavia has been in the family since the eighteenth century, with vineyards originally planted by Stanko Radikon's grandfather Franz Mikulus. Stanko was born in 1948, began making wine in 1976, and first bottled wine from the 1979 vintage. The early wines followed conventional practice for the time — stainless steel fermentation, small French oak barrels for aging, sulfite additions. It was in 1995 that everything changed.

That year, prompted by childhood memories of the unsulfured, spontaneously fermented wines his grandfather and father had made for family and local restaurants, Stanko made an experimental batch of Ribolla Gialla with extended skin maceration. He liked the result immediately, and over the next several years extended the practice across all his white wines, experimenting with maceration times and eventually settling on approximately three months for the Ribolla Gialla. He also began eliminating sulfite additions — testing from the 2001 vintage onward and committing fully from 2002. The wines that emerged were unlike anything being produced commercially in Italy at the time.

Stanko passed away in 2016 at age 62, having made 36 vintages. His son Saša, who had grown up in the cellar and the vineyard, took over the estate and has continued it with equal commitment. The 18-hectare estate is managed entirely without herbicides or pesticides, with all activities timed to lunar phases. Saša has introduced the "S" range — wines with a shorter maceration of 10–14 days and one year of aging, intended as a more approachable entry into the Radikon style. The flagship Ribolla Gialla, however, follows Stanko's protocol: three months on the skins, three to four years in large Slavonian oak casks, no additions, no filtration, and bottling in Radikon's signature 1-liter custom bottle designed to provide aging conditions equivalent to a magnum.

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Oslavia is a small hilltop village in the municipality of Gorizia, in Friuli-Venezia Giulia at the extreme northeastern edge of Italy, a few hundred feet from the Slovenian border. It occupies a narrow stretch of steep hillside terrain in the Collio wine zone, squeezed between the Isonzo River plain to the south and the Slovenian hills across the border to the east. The village's name carries the weight of the First World War — the surrounding hills were the site of a series of devastating Isonzo battles between 1915 and 1917, and the landscape still bears traces of that history.

What makes Oslavia distinctive for viticulture is its soils. The ponca — known internationally as flysch — is a compressed, stratified sequence of marl, sandstone, and marine fossil sediment deposited over millions of years when this part of the Apennine foothills was seabed. The rock is friable and crumbles along its stratified layers, giving vine roots access to deep mineral resources while also draining freely enough to prevent waterlogging in the wet Friulian winters. This combination of clay-calcareous composition and marine mineral content gives wines grown on ponca their characteristic saline, stony backbone and capacity for long aging.

The broader Collio DOC covers the hills from Gorizia north to the Slovenian border, and has historically been one of Italy's most important zones for white wine. In the 1980s, Collio was associated with clean, varietal white wines made in stainless steel. Starting in the mid-1990s, a small group of producers in Oslavia — Stanko Radikon, Josko Gravner, and Edi Kante among them — began recovering the older tradition of fermenting white wines on their skins for months. Their wines did not conform to Collio DOC regulations and were released as Venezia Giulia IGT, but they changed the direction of natural white winemaking internationally, introducing the modern orange wine movement.