When Wine Gets Interesting: Foradori, Occhipinti, Radikon and a Different Side of Italy

There is a point in drinking Italian wine when the familiar names are no longer quite enough.

You have tasted Barolo. You understand Chianti Classico. You know Brunello, Amarone and perhaps Etna.

Then something else starts to become interesting.

A grape you had barely heard of.

A white wine fermented on its skins.

A vineyard farmed differently because the grower believes the soil matters more than the cellar.

A Pinot Grigio that looks nothing like Pinot Grigio.

A wine that does not immediately fit into the categories you thought you understood.

For many drinkers, producers such as Foradori, Arianna Occhipinti and Radikon are where that next conversation begins.

They come from completely different parts of Italy and make very different wines.

Yet they share an idea that has become increasingly important in modern Italian wine: the bottle should tell you something about where it came from and who made it.

Not through novelty.

Through identity.

Foradori: Rediscovering What Was Already There

In Trentino, Foradori's story begins with Teroldego, a grape that for many years rarely received the attention given to Italy's more famous varieties.

Elisabetta Foradori helped change that.

Rather than trying to make Teroldego resemble something more internationally recognisable, the estate increasingly looked inward: towards the Campo Rotaliano, its alluvial soils, individual vineyards and the potential of the grape itself.

The current 2024 Foradori Sgarzon Teroldego makes that philosophy particularly clear.

Sgarzon comes from a cooler site and is fermented and aged with its skins in large Spanish clay vessels known as tinajas. The amphora is not there to make the wine unusual. Its purpose is almost the opposite: to give the wine structure without covering the vineyard with the flavour of new oak.

The result is Teroldego with perfume, acidity, fine tannin and an almost mineral freshness rather than simple weight.

That same thinking extends well beyond red wine.

The 2024 Foradori Fontanasanta Nosiola is made from one of Trentino's historic white grapes and spends eight months on its skins in tinaja.

It is exactly the sort of bottle that can change someone's understanding of white wine.

Dry, herbal, savoury and lightly tannic, it has the structure we normally associate with red wine while retaining the freshness and energy of an Alpine white.

Then there is the 2024 Foradori Fontanasanta Manzoni Bianco, fermented on skins in cement before ageing in acacia.

It is less obviously unconventional but perhaps just as interesting: textured and substantial, yet precise, floral and fresh.

And if there is one wine capable of making somebody completely reconsider a familiar grape, it might be the 2024 Foradori Fuoripista Pinot Grigio.

Forget pale, neutral Pinot Grigio.

Fuoripista spends more than eight months on its pink-grey skins in amphora. The result is copper coloured, textural, aromatic and gently tannic — Pinot Grigio treated as a serious grape rather than simply a refreshing one.

Foradori makes sense when you stop asking whether the wines are conventional.

The more useful question is whether they taste unmistakably of somewhere.

They do.

Arianna Occhipinti: Sicily Without the Weight

Travel almost the entire length of Italy and the landscape changes completely.

Around Vittoria in southeastern Sicily, Arianna Occhipinti has built one of the country's most recognisable estates around a very different expression of Sicilian wine.

Sicily can easily be associated with sunshine, ripeness and power.

Occhipinti shows another side.

Frappato can be fragrant and delicate.

Nero d'Avola can have freshness.

White varieties can carry both Mediterranean perfume and real tension.

The wines can feel unmistakably southern without becoming heavy.

A perfect introduction is the 2024 Occhipinti SP68 Bianco.

Named after the provincial road beside the estate, SP68 Bianco combines Moscato di Alessandria and Albanello and uses skin contact to add texture and savoury complexity.

There is orange blossom, citrus, herbs and Mediterranean perfume, but underneath it is something more important: freshness.

It tastes of Sicily without relying on richness to tell you where it comes from.

At another level of the estate sit Occhipinti's individual vineyard wines.

The 2022 Occhipinti 'BB' Frappato, currently in the Bricchi & Barrett collection, takes Frappato somewhere more serious and detailed. Rather than treating the grape simply as a light and charming Sicilian red, these wines explore differences between particular sites around Vittoria.

The same curiosity extends to white wine.

The 2023 Occhipinti 'SM' Grillo comes from the Santa Margherita vineyard and shows how structured, saline and complex Sicilian Grillo can become when the emphasis moves from simple fruit towards vineyard and texture. It is one of those bottles that reminds you how much unexplored territory still exists among Italy's native white varieties.

What makes Occhipinti interesting is not simply that the wines are organic, biodynamic or made with minimal intervention.

Those things matter.

But farming philosophy alone does not make a wine compelling.

The important part is what arrives in the glass.

Perfume.

Freshness.

Texture.

And a very clear sense of Vittoria.

Radikon: The Wine That Changed the Colour of White

Then there is Radikon.

In Oslavia, close to the Slovenian border in Friuli, the Radikon family helped revive a way of making white wine that was once traditional and then became almost forgotten: fermenting white grapes together with their skins for extended periods.

Today we call these wines orange or amber wines.

For Radikon, they are simply wine.

The distinction matters.

Long skin contact was never intended as a fashion statement. It gives white wine tannin, structure, colour and a completely different relationship with food and ageing.

The 2022 Radikon Slatnik  is perhaps one of the easiest places to understand the idea.

Made from Chardonnay and Friulano, it receives skin maceration before ageing in large Slavonian oak. The result is golden-amber, savoury and textural, with fruit, citrus peel, herbs, tannin and salinity all occupying the same glass.

The 2022 Radikon Sivi  takes Pinot Grigio into similarly unfamiliar territory.

“Sivi” means grey in Slovenian, a reference to the natural colour of Pinot Grigio's skins.

Instead of removing those skins immediately and producing a pale white wine, Radikon allows them to become part of the wine.

The result is copper-pink, savoury and gently tannic — a gastronomic Pinot Grigio with far more in common with structured wine than with the anonymous examples the grape sometimes produces.

Both are also available in larger formats, including the 2022 Radikon Sivi Magnum  and  2022 Radikon Slatnik Magnum — particularly interesting for wines whose texture and complexity continue to evolve with time.

And then there are the serious Radikon wines.

The 2008 Radikon 3781 Ribolla Gialla  sits at an entirely different level.

Produced from a selected Ribolla Gialla parcel and given extraordinarily long ageing before release, it shows what happens when skin-contact wine is treated not as something youthful or fashionable, but as a wine capable of developing for years.

Amber, tannic, oxidative, savoury and intensely complex, it is closer to the experience of drinking a mature fine wine than to any simplistic idea of “orange wine”.

Different Wines, Similar Questions

Foradori, Occhipinti and Radikon do not form a movement.

They do not make the same style of wine.

They do not even inhabit similar landscapes.

Foradori works beneath the mountains of Trentino.

Occhipinti among the sun, limestone and red soils of southeastern Sicily.

Radikon on the hills of Oslavia, where Italian and Slovenian cultures meet.

What connects them is something more useful.

They make us ask questions.

Why should Pinot Grigio always be pale?

Why should white wine have no tannin?

Why did some native grape varieties almost disappear?

Why should oak be allowed to speak louder than a vineyard?

Why should Sicily always mean power?

And perhaps most importantly: why should interesting wine always fit neatly into a category we already understand?

This Is Where Wine Becomes Interesting

There is nothing wrong with drinking the classics.

We love Barolo, Brunello and great Chianti Classico for exactly the reasons those wines became famous.

But curiosity is one of the great pleasures of wine.

Eventually, you want to discover what sits beside the famous regions and outside the familiar styles.

You want to understand why a grower chooses clay instead of oak.

Why someone keeps white grapes on their skins.

Why an almost forgotten variety is worth preserving.

Why two neighbouring vineyards can produce wines that feel completely different.

That is where producers such as Foradori, Arianna Occhipinti and Radikon become important.

Not because they are different for the sake of being different.

Because their wines remind us that Italy is far larger, stranger and more diverse than its most famous labels suggest.

And very often, that is when wine starts getting interesting.

Explore more from our collection of Italian, organic and biodynamic wines at Bricchi & Barrett.

Written by Vittorio — Chief Tasting Officer