
Harvested, aged, and packaged in the dark, a new sparkling wine from Slovenian wine producer Radgonske gorice is made using what the wine producer is calling the “Crafted in Darkness” method to eliminate the light-struck aromas, or off-flavors, that result from exposure to daylight or artificial lighting.
Klavdija Topolovec Špur, Enologist for Radgonske gorice
According to Noble’s research, when wine is exposed to daylight or artificial lighting, the intensity of the wine’s citrus aromas decreases, while the intensity of “cooked cabbage or wet dog aromas” increases.
The Chardonnay grapes for Untouched by Light are harvested in the dark.
Untouched by Light is aged for up to three years in Radgonske gorice's wine cellars in the caves of Gornja Radgona, Slovenia.
The wine will be packaged using Radgonske gorice’s existing equipment, which includes fully-automated filling and semi-automated disgorgement. (Disgorgement involves opening the bottle, removing the pellet of frozen yeast that forms during fermentation of sparkling wine, then recorking the bottle for sale.)
Topolovec Špur says the wine will also require some manual packaging as well, including the application of the vacuum bag over the bottle. “We will have minimum lighting during the vacuum process because of the great precision needed, but because the glass bottle is black and will probably also have foil protection, the light will not be able to penetrate it,” she explains.
The black bag is made from a multilayer construction of PET/aluminum/polyethylene and will be digitally printed and varnished. Radgonske gorice is still finalizing suppliers for both the bottle and the bag.
While the wine will not launch until next year, the wine producer began taking pre-orders in summer 2019 and already has 200 orders lined up from distributors and media. The wine will be available globally for Є100 (roughly US$111) through the Untouched by Light website and will be distributed via the same channels as Radgonske gorice’s other brands, with a focus on the U.S. and the U.K
Says Topolovec Špur of the number of pre-orders, “This is more interest than we expected. Of course, there are always skeptics saying this is only a marketing stunt, but we stand behind the concepts and the reasons for it, and our experience as well as research shows this idea is justified.”