Radikon

The Free Bacchus Story

Leave white grapes on their skins for weeks or months and the wine comes out amber, tannic, and structurally closer to a light red than to white Burgundy. In the 1990s it was a tough sell.

Stanko Radikon spent that decade rethinking nearly everything he had been taught, and became, alongside Josko Gravner from the same village of Oslavia, one of the founding names of the modern skin-contact revival: extended maceration, no sulphur, years in large Slavonian oak, bottled unfiltered. The vineyards have been certified organic by CEVIQ since 2019, though the wine itself is not certified.

Stanko Radikon's line was that he sent his son Saša to take a winemaking degree so that he would learn exactly what not to do. The wines challenge the assumption that white wine should be pale, clean and quickly consumed, and they are not for everyone — which the family have never pretended otherwise about.

Stanko died in 2016; his son Saša continues with the same standards and the same refusal to simplify. Skin contact on white grapes is now a global trend.