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 old Sherry than to white Burgundy. In the 1990s, doing this deliberately was regarded as either a mistake or a provocation.

Stanko Radikon spent that decade rethinking nearly everything he had been taught, and arrived, alongside Josko Gravner from the same village of Oslavia, at the origin point of the modern skin-contact movement: extended maceration, no sulphur, years in large Slavonian oak, bottled unfiltered. The estate is ICEA certified organic, and the farming is as uncompromising as the cellar work.

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. The influence on winemakers in France, Australia and the United States who have since experimented with skin contact cannot be measured in cases produced. It shows up instead on wine lists everywhere.