July 07, 2026 - 0 comments
Why Radikon Made the World's Smallest Bottle Neck
At Radikon, every detail of a bottle is considered. Even its neck. When Sasa Radikon talks about bottle aging, he isn't thinking about marketing or tradition. He's thinking about the relationship between wine, cork and time.
"We have the smallest neck ever made for a wine bottle," he explains. The decision wasn't aesthetic, it was a response to a practical problem.
Years ago, finding consistently high-quality corks had become increasingly difficult. Sasa's father went directly to their cork supplier and asked for the very best cork they could produce. The answer was unexpected.
The finest corks weren't the standard size used for most wine bottles. They were thinner corks, harvested from oak trees growing on drier hillsides. Less humidity meant fewer fungi, healthier bark and ultimately a cleaner, more reliable cork.
Rather than adapt the cork to the bottle, Radikon adapted the bottle to the cork.
Working with their glass manufacturer, they designed an unusually narrow neck to fit these smaller, higher-quality corks. Then they made another unconventional decision: instead of using a standard 750ml bottle, they increased the capacity to one litre.
The result is a bottle with the same cork-to-wine proportion as a Magnum, long considered the ideal format for aging wine because the smaller surface of cork in contact with a larger volume of wine allows for slower, more stable evolution.
For Radikon, this isn't a theoretical exercise. Their wines spend years aging in the cellar before release, so every element of the bottle is designed to give the wine the best possible conditions to develop.
The one-litre bottle has since become one of the estate's signatures, but its origin lies in a simple question: how can we give the wine the best life after it leaves the cellar?
As Sasa laughs, his father had another reason for loving the format:
"The one-litre bottle is the perfect bottle if there are two people, and one of them isn't drinking."
