The wine untouched by the scourge of daylight
Slovenian Untouched By Light sparkling wine does exactly what it says on the bottle.
Its Chardonnay grapes are picked on moonless nights on the Bouvier family (as in Jackie Kennedy) Radgona vineyard in south-east Slovenia and matured in pitch-black, 170-year-old cellars. They are bottled in 99.8% black glass and shipped and sold in vacuum-sealed light-free bags. The wine is recommended to be served and enjoyed in the dark, ideally from opaque wine glasses.
The 170-year-old Radgonske Gorice winery, in the well-known wine growing areas of Stajerska, meanwhile, claims it has produced the first “crafted by darkness” Schaumwein sparkling wine, avoiding exposure to light from harvest to bottling.
different!
Last year, I was invited to (virtually) taste a brand new wine release, during its world premier unveiling event. The star of what turned out to be the slightly bizarre show was the 2016 – and inaugural – vintage of
Radgonske Gorice (who have nearly 170 years of sparkling wine experience under their belts, though this one was brand new even to them).
The idea – gimmicky or brilliant, depending on your point of view and level of skepticism – is that this particular bubbly is billed as the world’s first sparkling wine made, sold, and tasted in complete darkness.
Yeah, I’m serious. And yeah, I’m sober (right now, anyway). Some details from their press release:
The top 12 wine bargains of 2020 include an outstanding boxed malbec for the equivalent of $5 a bottle Dave McIntyre The most unusual wine I tasted this year was a bubbly from Slovenia called Untouched by Light. It was made by the Radgonske Gorice winery, which dates back to the Hapsburgs, with the premise that any exposure to light damages wine. The grapes were harvested at night and the wine produced, bottled and aged in an unlit cave by workers wearing night-vision goggles, then packaged in black bottles, wrapped in vacuum-sealed black bags and shipped off to lucky invitees around the world. The wine was officially unveiled during a nighttime gala at the winery, complete with an emcee, a world-renowned champagne expert to exclaim its virtues, and an apparently famous Slovenian singer crooning lengthy ballads from a balcony. And in keeping with the ethos of 2020, the whole shebang was hosted over Zoom.