The road out of Gorizia climbs for four kilometres and then Oslavia simply happens: a scatter of houses, a church, the white ossuary of the Isonzo front on its hill, and vines on every slope that faces the light. This is the Collio, the border hills of Friuli in the far north-east of Italy, and Slovenia begins somewhere in the next row. It was the last week of October, it had rained all night, and the ponca in the lane had gone the colour of wet cardboard. At 09:30 the thermometer on my dashboard read 11 °C.
Saša Radikon met me at the cellar at Tre Buchi with two coffees. He is an unhurried man who does not fill pauses. We watched the rain for a minute before he said the vats were open and the smell was good.
A grandfather’s method, taken back#
The Radikon family has farmed at Oslavia since 1861 and has bottled under its own name from the 1979 vintage. Stanko Radikon took the estate over from his father Edi as a teenager, and for the first fifteen years of bottling the house made the fresh, pressed whites the Collio was known for. In 1995 he changed course. He went back to what his grandfather had done as a matter of routine: fermenting Ribolla Gialla on its skins, like a red. Seven days at first. Then weeks. Then months.
The reasoning, as he later explained it, was not ideology. Ribolla is a thick-skinned grape; pressed early it gives a neutral, high-acid white, and most of what the vine spent the summer building stays behind in the skins. Ferment on the skins and you get colour, tannin, aroma and, he argued, a wine that holds itself together without much help from the cellar.
Stanko died in September 2016. Saša had been working beside him since the early 2000s, and he has run the house since. Nothing about it reads as a break. The vats are the same, the pace is the same, and the labels still carry the family name and not much else.
Ponca, open oak and time#
We walked up behind the buildings first, rain or not. Oslavia sits at about 150 to 200 metres and the soil under the vines is ponca, the local name for an Eocene flysch of marl and sandstone that crumbles in your hand and reforms after every winter. Saša broke off a wet slab and it came apart in layers, like pastry. Roots go deep here because they have to; the hills drain fast, and about 1,500 millimetres of rain a year go through them.
The dozen or so hectares hold Ribolla Gialla, Friulano, Chardonnay, Sauvignon and Pinot Grigio, with Merlot and Pignolo for the reds. In the cellar the whites go into open vats of Slavonian oak and stay on their skins for weeks to months, depending on the grape and the year. Then the wine goes into large old botti and stays there for years. Nothing is filtered. The long-macerated wines are bottled without added sulfur, as the estate has said publicly for a long time; the family’s position is that time in wood and the tannin from the skins give the stability, not chemistry.
I lifted the lid of a vat of this year’s Ribolla with him. The cap of skins had darkened to the colour of dried figs, and the smell was orange peel, wet hay and something like black tea. Saša put his nose to it for a while and closed the lid. That is the whole conversation a winemaker needs with a vat at that stage.
“The skins are not a technique,” he said. “They are what the grape brought with it. We just stopped throwing them away.”
The half-litre and the litre#
The other thing everyone notices about Radikon is the bottle. From the 2002 vintage Stanko and his friend Edi Kante, over on the Carso, introduced 500 ml and 1 l bottles closed with a slim custom cork. The logic is a ratio: a narrower neck against the volume of wine means less oxygen per litre through the cork, so the half-litre ages like a magnum rather than like a half-bottle. The litre, the family says, is for the table, to be shared, poured at 14 to 16 °C, not cold.
Saša took two bottles down for us in the tasting room: the Ribolla Gialla, and the Oslavje, the blend of Chardonnay, Sauvignon and Pinot Grigio named for the Slovene form of the village. Later he added a splash of Jakot, the Friulano, which is “Tokaj” spelled backwards; the estate took the name after Friulian growers lost the right to the word “Tocai” in 2007. There is also a shorter-maceration “S” line, Slatnik and RS, for people who want the idea in a lighter key.
The Oslavje was rounder, quince and beeswax with a long bitter-orange finish: the same argument, made politely.
Frico, pork and a litre on the table#
Lunch was in Cormons, twenty minutes west, at a place Saša suggested. Frico came first, the Friulian cake of Montasio cheese and potato fried until the edges go to lace, then roast pork with mustard fruits and a plate of San Daniele ham for the table. A litre of Ribolla stood between us and went down faster than the size suggests it should. This is the pairing the Collio actually does, and it explains the wine better than I can: the tannin cuts the fat, the salinity meets the salt, and nobody at the table asks whether it is white or orange.
On tour#
On my Friuli and Collio orange wine tour we come to Oslavia on the second day, driving up from Trieste, and walk the hill below the ossuary before the cellar, so that guests have seen the ponca and smelled the rain before they taste what grows out of it. Tastings here are by appointment, and I keep the group to two cellars a day at most; a Radikon tasting runs to six or eight wines and cannot be rushed. Some guests pair this week with the Piedmont and Langhe tour just before it: Nebbiolo one week, skin-contact Ribolla the next, two ends of northern Italy thinking differently about the same job.
My note on orange wine and skin contact explains what happens in the vat and why the colour is the least interesting part. Stanko Radikon was one of the founders of ViniVeri in 2003, and in 2008 he and five neighbours formed the Oslavia Ribolla producers’ association to write rules for the macerated style. The Autentisté growers I visit in Moravia, half an hour from my door in Brno, name this cellar when I ask them where the idea came from. Joško Gravner’s cellar is in the same village; that is another story.
We finished at about 15:30. The rain had stopped and the ossuary on the hill was white against grey. Saša walked me to the car and said the vats would be ready when they were ready. I have heard that sentence in a good many cellars. Here it sounds like a plan.
